The German Federal Constitutional Court (
Bundesverfassungs-gericht
) on March 2, 2010, rejected the legislation requiring the general six-month retention of all electronic communications traffic. The data retention obligations implemented EC Directive 2006/24/EC and entered into force on January 1, 2008. The constitutional complaint was brought to the court by approximately 35,000 citizens (the largest number of plaintiffs ever involved in a German court case), one of the plaintiffs being current Minister of Justice Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger.
The court found in particular that the data storage was not secure enough and that the purposes of the data usages were not defined clearly enough. The judges considered "such retention an especially grave intrusion" into citizens' privacy. As a consequence, the court ordered immediate deletion of the data already collected. Furthermore, a comprehensive modification of the law is necessary in order to provide stricter conditions for the use and storage of the data. According to the decision, the data should be encoded and there should be "transparent control" of the information usage. Now, the lawmaker will have to revise the data retention provisions in order to comply with the EC directive as well as German constitutional guarantees.
