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Macedonian: Продолжува битката против задржување....
Deutsch: Fortsetzung im Kampf gegen die Vorratsdatenspeicherung
During the 32nd Annual Conference of the Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners "Privacy: Generations" that took place on 27 and 28 October 2010, EDRi-member Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called for the abolition of the European Union's Data Retention Directive.
"The Data Retention Directive is highly controversial, if not wildly unpopular throughout the European Union. The directive was strongly opposed by European privacy activists ... as each country in the EU has implemented the Data Retention Directive in their own law, they have faced challenges in state courts," explained Eva Galperin of EFF, in a blog post.
"The experience in Europe makes clear that mandatory data retention regimes are disproportionate and unnecessary. We continue to believe that the legitimate needs of law enforcement can be met by a more targeted data preservation regime, without the collateral damage inflicted by the 2006 directive. Rather than fighting the privacy battle across Europe one state at a time, EFF urges European Privacy Authorities to call upon the European Commission to stand up for Internet users' fundamental rights, and repeal the 2006 Data Retention Directive outright", stated the EFF.
Indeed, the EU Data Protection Directive has been facing a strong and large opposition for several years now. Even the Roadmap published by the EU is indicating that the national implementation has been more complicated than initially thought. Thus most Member States were late in transposing, and 6 have not yet introduced transposing legislation, whereas in 2 Member States the Constitutional Court annulled the national law transposing the Directive. (Germany and Romania, plus a pending case in Hungary). Also there is already a referral to the ECJ for a preliminary ruling at the behest of the Irish High Court .
Also the expert group on data retention that should "unite in a single platform all European stakteholders" seems to be missing the civil society representation or the human rights experts.
According to a Commission source, the review report of the directive, which was due on 15 September 2010, has recently been postponed to March 2011. The Commission seems to have difficulties to get data from the member states that proves that data retention is necessary and proportionate in a democratic society.
EFF Urges EU Data Protection Authorities to Call for the Repeal of the EU
Data Retention Directive (25.10.2010)
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/10/eff-calls-eu-data-protection-and-...
EFF calls for repeal of Data Retention Directive (29.10.2010)
http://www.out-law.com//default.aspx?page=11502
Roadmap - Proposal for a review of the Directive 2006/24/EC (Data Retention)
http://ec.europa.eu/governance/impact/planned_ia/docs/2011_home_006_da...
Civil society calls for an end to compulsory telecommunications data
retention (28.06.2010)
http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/content/view/370/79/lang,en/
EDRi-gram: WP29 criticizes the implementation of the EU data retention
directive (28.07.2010)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number8.15/article-29-working-party-opini...