And Another One Bites The Dust: Mass Surveillance Ruled Unconstitutional In Slovak Republic

from the time-to-take-the-hint dept

As we noted a few weeks ago, data retention laws continue to fall in Europe. Then it was Bulgaria, following in the wake of Netherlands. Now we learn that the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic has similarly struck down the country's data retention provisions, as reported by the European Information Society Institute:

An act, which ordered large-scale mass surveillance of citizens (so called data retention) is now history. Today the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic proclaimed the mass surveillance of citizens as unconstitutional. The decision was rendered within proceedings initiated by 30 members of the Parliament on behalf of the European Information Society Institute (EISi), a Slovakia based think-tank.

Those judgments are all in line with the ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) that the over-arching EU Data Retention Directive was "invalid." Even the European Commission seems resigned to the fact that there will be no new data retention laws at the EU level.

However, that still leaves the possibility of national laws, provided they do not fall foul of the CJEU judgment, which implicitly offered guidelines how that might be achieved. Germany still seems determined to try, while legal action in the UK will determine whether the recent Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) has managed the trick.

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Filed Under: mass surveillance, slovak republic, surveillance, unconstitutional