European Commission will “monitor” existing EU data retention laws

The European Commission (EC) told EDRi that it “will continue monitoring legislative developments at the national level” regarding the existence of data retention laws in EU Member States. The EC provided this non-committal response to the letter we sent on 2 July 2015, asking the Commission to investigate illegal data retention laws in the European Union. EDRi, along with the Electronic Frontier Finland (EFF), the IT-Political Association of Denmark (IT-Ροl), the Open Rights Group (ORG), Panoptykon and other EDRi members, produced an analysis of a sample of existing national laws in EU Member States which requires the retention of their citizens’ personal data. Even though the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) invalidated the Data Retention Directive in April 2014 in the Digital Rights Ireland Case v. Minister for Communications case (Joined Cases C-293/12 and C-594/12), there are still a number of existing and national laws in the EU which appear to be illegal in light of this ruling. https://edri.org/european-commission-will-monitor-existing-eu-data-retention-laws/ https://edri.org/files/Dataretention/EC_Response%2828-7-2015%29.pdf The European Commission’s response to EDRi’s letter