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European Digital Rights (EDRi) has joined other 42 civil liberties NGOs and professional associations in signing the amicus curiae brief initiated by German NGO Working Group on Data Retention (Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung).

The action is destined to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in relation to the action started on 6 July 2006 - Ireland vs. Council of the European Union, European Parliament (Case C-301/06). The brief is asking ECJ to annul the EU directive on data retention pointing out that apart from the formal grounds put forward by Ireland, the directive is, most of all, illegal on material grounds.

According to the document, data retention violates the right to respect for

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The Federal German Constitutional Court issued a preliminary decision on 19 March 2008 in the case supported by 34 000 people against the German implementation of the data retention directive. The preliminary ruling has considered that parts of the act are unconstitutional pending review.

The decision does not prohibit the electronic communication companies to gather the data, but limits its use, explaining that the retained data can be transferred to law enforcement authorities only in cases of serious crimes and with a judicial warrant.

The data shall be made available only in prosecuting or judging serious crime cases when other evidences are not accessible or are not enough. At

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The complaint challenging the German data retention law in front of the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe has become the biggest constitutional case in German history with the submission of more than 34000 signatures backing up the action. The Working Group on Data Retention has also prepared an amicus curiae brief that it wants to submit to the European Court of Justice in the case Ireland vs. the Data Retention Directive and that can be signed by other NGOs.

In early February 2008, the German Federal Constitutional Court sent the application for the suspension of the data retention act to the Government, both chambers of the Parliament as well as the Governments of the Länder for

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The Romanian Government adopted on 20 February 2008 the draft law on data retention, but despite the official press release that praises the new measure, several officials have complained about the lack of reality of the legal text.

The draft law was adopted by the Government at about one year after the Ministry of Information Technology and Communication (MCTI) presented the first draft, with no major changes in the text. This means that the Government has changed its previous intention to adopt the text as an Emergency Ordinance.

The data should be retained for one year. The obligation to retain the data is only for electronic communication operators, thus excluding information

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The Lisbon Treaty was signed in December 2007. Notwithstanding the many critics raised by this Treaty, the text, when ratified by all member States, will bring two major improvements to the EU and its citizens. First, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union will become part of the Community acquis, including its articles 7 (Respect for private and family life) and 8 (Protection of personal data). Secondly, the Treaty will allow the accession of the EU to the European Convention on Human Rights and, hence, will give EU citizens the possibility of being protected against abuses of their human rights by EU institutions. This improvement would be much welcome, especially - though not exclusively - considering the

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Privacy and data protection seems not to be a hot topic for the Romanian society. The media is generally ignoring the topic, unless something related to an important public figure is making the subject out of the ordinary. The Romanian Data Protection Authority has failed in becoming a privacy public supporter and has rather emerged as a data protection controller's register. Under these general circumstances, 2007 was rather a calm year, where the main success of the government in the field of privacy - the non-adoption of the data retention law - was obtained by mistake only due to bureaucratic reasons.

a. Data retention

The first draft of the data retention law that needs to implement the EU

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a. Data Retention Litigation

The Digital Rights Ireland litigation against data retention, which was started in September 2006, continues before the High Court. This action challenges both the Directive and also Ireland's domestic data retention laws. It alleges that those laws are procedurally flawed and are also in breach of the right to privacy guaranteed under the Irish Constitution and Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It also argues that data retention will have a chilling effect on the Constitutional and ECHR rights to freedom of expression and association. In addition, the action argues that the tracking of the movements of any person carrying a mobile

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Last year has seen an increased number attempts from government bodies to extend their powers and make it easier to access people's private information. To name a few, there were legal proposals to increase the number of agencies authorized to access and process electronic communication data collected by telecommunication companies under the Data Retention law, national DNA database enlargement, plans for various administrative database sharing, introduction of even more CCTV systems and the pressure on air travel operators to share records about their passengers. The introduction of biometric into travel documents data as a mean of identification and the use of contactless chip technologies

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a. Data Retention - a reality

15 September 2007 - data retention became a reality in Denmark. The administrative order, which sets the scope and conditions for data retention, was approved on 28 September 2006 with an implementation deadline of one year. The order, which was drafted by the Ministry of Justice, had been underway for more than four years. The Act providing for data retention was approved by the Danish Parliament already in June 2002 as part of the Danish "anti-terrorism package," which extended the scope of Section 786 of the Administration of Justice Act (Act No. 378 of 6 June 2002).

The administrative order regulates in more details the obligations of the

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UK-based human rights group Privacy International (PI) published at the end of last year the 2007 ranking assessment of the state of privacy in 47 countries, including all European Union member states.

The raking is based on the Privacy & Human Rights reports produced since 1997 by PI together with US-based Electronic Privacy Information Center and is taking into consideration several criteria such as constitutional & statutory protection and privacy enforcement, biometric ID cards, data-sharing, video surveillance, communication interceptions and data retention.

According to the authors, the project wants to "recognize countries in which privacy protection and respect for privacy is nurtured. This is done in the