The German Constitutional Court Judgment on Data Retention: Goodbye Unlimited Surveillance, Hello Proportionality

Since its adoption on 15th March 2006, the Data Retention Directive and its national applications have "generated" a quite impressive amount of courts' judgments: ranging from the ECJ to the administrative (e.g. Germany and Bulgaria) and constitutional courts of some Member States. However, the judgment of the German Constitutional Court, delivered three weeks ago, on the 2nd March 2010, is already at the centre of the attention of several commentators, from civil society to lawyers, from journalists to politicians. In the judgment, the Court says no to German implementation laws of the Data Retention Directive (2006/24/EC), demanding telecommunication data retention from 6 months till 2 years. In this post we want to highlight some of the main features of the ruling and then contextualize the judgment in the wider framework of EU data processing and protection debates.