European lawyers have succeeded in getting the two key amendments they wanted into the proposed EU directive on data retention, with the aim of protecting privilege.

The amendments pressed by the Council of Law Societies and Bars of the EU (CCBE) bid to force governments to obtain judicial approval for access to data and to respect privilege. The European Parliament's civil liberties committee voted to include the amendments last week. It will now go before the full parliament.


Under the directive, service providers would be required to retain telephone data for one year and Internet data for six months.


These amendments move to solve the thorny issue of allowing access to privileged information, said the CCBE's secretary-general Jonathan Goldsmith. They should also mitigate potential government abuse of powers, he said.


He added: 'Until [now] we had no guarantee that for access to data there would be a judge involved. To be crude, the government could approach the authority that retained the data and say "give it to us".'



But Attorney-General Lord Peter Goldsmith's argument (see [2005] Gazette, 24 November, 3) that the directive should only be concerned with retention and not access is 'worrying', said Jonathan Goldsmith. 'We all know the reason they want to retain data is to access it.'



'The next argument in the Council of Ministers will be about this,' he added. 'You can't talk about retention without talking about access.'


The CCBE has found itself in the same camp as IT pressure groups. European Digital Rights (EDRi), an umbrella body representing 21 IT civil liberties groups, has been pushing hard against the directive.


EDRi board member Sjoera Nas acknowledged that judicial authorisation is 'extremely important', but said the directive as a whole is a step in the wrong direction. 'This process seriously jeopardises essential human rights,' she said. 'There is no evidence at all that retaining data on all citizens will prove essential in the fight against serious crime and terrorism. Quite the opposite.'