Romanian Constitutional Court decision against data retention

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Deutsch: [Urteil des rumänischen Verfassungsgerichts gegen Vorratsdatenspeicherung| http://www.unwatched.org/node/1607]

The decision of the Romanian Constitutional Court (CCR) against the data
retention law was finally published in the Official Monitor on 23 November
2009.

The motivation of the court, which was made public only with a few days
before its publication in the Official Monitor, shows an interesting
argument from a Court with no prior jurisprudence in the field of privacy
protection. Thus, the court not only criticizes several aspects of the text
of the law, but declares the whole law as unconstitutional because it
breaches the right to corespondence and to privacy.

Even though only several articles were mentioned in the motion of
unconstitutionality, the Court went further and examined art 20 of the law
that could have been interpreted as an open door for the secret services to
access the retain data under any circumstances and without a judicial
approval, an issue that was raised by EDRi-member APTI starting with the
public consultations in 2007.

CCR notes that the principle of limited collection of personal data is
emptied through this new regulation that obliges a continuos retention of
traffic data for 6 month.”The legal obligation that foresees the continuous
retention of personal data transforms though the exception from the
principle of effective protection of privacy right and freedom of
expression, into an absolute rule. The right appears as being regulated in a
negative manner, its positive role losing its prevailing character.”

CCR also makes a comparison with article 91^1 of the Penal Procedure
Court (CPP) dealing with audio and video interceptions in crime cases, that
was considered constitutional in an earlier ruling. The text of the CPP
allows the video interception only in a specific case and person, only with
judicial supervision, only for the future and for a period that may not
exceed 120 days under any circumstances . The Court concludes that
basically, this data retention law deletes the right to privacy in terms of
electronic communications: “Therefore, the regulation of a positive
obligation that foresees the continuous limitation of the privacy right and
secrecy of correspondence makes the essence of the right disappear by
removing the safeguards regarding its execution.”

The court is underlining the fact, already pointed out by European
civil organizations even during the adoption of the data retention
directive, that the law considers all citizens as potential criminals: “This
(data retention) equally addresses all the law subjects, regardless of
whether they have committed penal crimes or not or whether they are the
subject of a penal investigation or not, which is likely to overturn the
presumption of innocence and to transform a priori all users of electronic
communication services or public communication networks into people
susceptible of committing terrorism crimes or other serious crimes.”

Finally, the court quotes the ECHR case of Klass and others vs Germany
(1978) considering that “taking surveillance measures without adequate and
sufficient safeguards can lead to ‘destroying democracy on the ground of
defending it .'”

According to art 147 of the Romanian Constitution, the legal provisions on
data retention are now suspended. The Government and Parliament have 45 days
to “fix” the unconstitutional provisions. But taking into consideration the
CCR reasoning, there are little chances that any text that would ask for a
six month blanket data retention would be considered as constitutional in
Romania. Moreover, there is currently only an interim government and a new
one is unlikely to appear in the next weeks (at least not until the second
round of presidential election, which is scheduled for 6 December).

Constitutional Court Decision no 1258 of 8 October 2009 (unofficial
English translation, 23.11.2009)
http://www.legi-internet.ro/english/jurisprudenta-it-romania/decizii-it/romanian-constitutional-court-decision-regarding-data-retention.html

Constitutional Court Decision no 1258 of 8 October 2009 (only in Romanian,
23.11.2009)
http://www.ccr.ro/decisions/pdf/ro/2009/D1258_09.pdf

APTI’s comments on draft data retention law (only in Romanian, 9.05.2007)
http://www.apti.ro/webfm_send/24

Romania: Data retention law declared unconstitutional (21.10.2009)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number7.20/romania-data-retention-law-unconstitutional

Art 147 of the Romanian Constitution
http://www.cdep.ro/pls/dic/site.page?den=act2_2&par1=5#t5c0s0a147