Patience seems to be coming to an end in Luxembourg. At least that is what the message that the European Court of Justice (ECJ) sent on Thursday gave rise to. The case law on data retention has been repeatedly "confirmed and nuanced", while efforts have also been made to provide "detailed explanations". It had long been expected that the debate would "be put to an end"; but she doesn't seem to have “found” one. And so Advocate General Manuel Campos Sánchez-Bordona once again made some things clear. According to his Opinion - which are not binding on the Court of Justice, but which it mostly follows - data retention only complies with European law if national security is seriously threatened. According to the Advocate General, German law does not meet this requirement.It was already an attempt at improvement.

Helene Bubrowski

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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Marlene Grunert

Editor in politics.

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The Bundestag introduced data retention for the first time in 2007, thereby implementing an EU directive.

To a large extent, the law required companies to record traffic and location data, i.e. information about who communicated when and where and in what way.

Three years later, the Federal Constitutional Court overturned the regulation;

The ECJ repealed the underlying guideline in 2014.

A year later the grand coalition tried again. It passed a regulation that should oblige Internet companies to store for ten weeks who has logged into the Internet and with what IP address. Telecommunications companies should record who has written whom and when, or who has spoken to whom and when. Companies should also keep track of where a cell phone is for four weeks.

At the end of 2016, the ECJ again objected to the data retention, prompted by questions from Swedish and British courts.

According to the ECJ, it is disproportionate to save communication data from the entire population purely as a precaution.

The Higher Administrative Court of North Rhine-Westphalia, which held the new German regulation in July 2017 to be incompatible with European law, orientated itself on this.

With the approval of the then Minister of Economic Affairs Brigitte Zypries (SPD), whose party had supported the data retention, the Federal Network Agency then effectively suspended the law.

The storage obligation will not be enforced until there is clarity, it was said at the time.

All questions have long been answered

The German regulations reached the European Court of Justice through actions brought by Telekom and the Internet provider Spacenet. Both companies are resisting having to save their customers' communication data. For them, it is about large sums of money that would have to be invested in new hardware. The Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig, where the proceedings ended, turned to the ECJ. According to the presiding judge, it is unclear whether Luxembourg has already issued a general ban on non-indiscriminate data retention. At the ECJ you see it differently. According to the Advocate General, all the questions raised can be found in the previous case law of the Court of Justice or can be easily derived from it.

In the recent attempt to introduce data retention, he recognizes “commendable progress” and “determined will” to adapt to the case law of the Court of Justice.

That, however, exhausts the praise of the otherwise unusually clear Opinion.