British Home Secretary Amber Rudd | Leon Neal/Getty Images UK to push for ways to redefine EU surveillance ruling Home Secretary Amber Rudd will try to convince other EU members to back her effort to redefine ruling.

British Home Secretary Amber Rudd will seek help from European interior ministers in finding ways around a European Court of Justice ruling that declared British surveillance laws to be illegal, the Financial Times reported Wednesday.

A limit on U.K. policing and intelligence powers would undermine the Continent's efforts to curtail cross-border crime, particularly terrorism, Rudd is expected to tell her European colleagues at a Justice and Home Affairs meeting on Thursday.

In a judgement published in December, the ECJ ruled that the U.K.'s “general and indiscriminate” retention of electronic communications was illegal. The judgement relates to a previous version of U.K. surveillance law, which has since been replaced with the stronger Investigatory Powers Act that makes records of every call made and every website visited by a user available to police and several public bodies without a warrant.

The legal challenge was originally made by two British MPs, Labour’s Tom Watson and Conservative David Davis, now Britain's Brexit secretary, who argued that the legislation posed a threat to civil liberties.

The U.K.'s high court will decide within the next few months on how the ECJ's ruling should be interpreted in domestic legislation.

Rudd will try to convince EU countries such as Belgium, France and Spain — who have suffered recent terrorist attacks — to join her efforts to find ways to redefine the restrictive Luxembourg ruling.