Already the second Constitutional Court of an EU Member State has ruled the implementation of the data retention directive (directive 2006/24/EC) and the subsequent general storage of citizens' communication data as unconstitutional: first the Romanian Constitutional Court (Curtea Constituţională a României), and now this morning the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht).

LYMEC President Aloys Rigaut reacted to the news: “We can only warmly welcome such judgement! This is yet another blow to the directive which required member states to store communication data of all their citizens for at least six months. While the actual content of phone calls and emails is not stored, the persons involved in the communication as well as all surrounding data is. For a phone call this means telephone number, name and address of the caller and the person called, duration of the call, in case of mobile phones the locations from and to where the call was made. For emails the name, address and IP-address of all persons involved, time of sending, as well as the whole header of the email message has to be stored. That data is collected for 500 million citizens and kept for six up to twenty-four months. Is that proportional to the terrorist threat? We do not think so.”

Today the European Parliament voted 378-196 to reject the SWIFT bank data sharing deal with the United States. Members of European Parliament resisted pressure from the US to continue a nine-month interim agreement allowing the United States of America access to financial transaction data from SWIFT, an international banking transfer system.

Aloys Rigaut, President of the European Liberal Youth (LYMEC) reacted to the news of the vote: “The European Parliament for the first time exercised its new powers under the Treaty of Lisbon, rejecting this scandalous agreement which would have given away the privacy of the very citizens they represent. We applaud the Parliamentarians who across party line opposed this dubious proposal. We are especially proud of the role liberals played in shaping this broad majority, not least based on the critical report of liberal rapporteur Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert.”