Digital Rights Group And ISPs Bring Legal Challenge Against New French Surveillance Law

from the just-the-beginning dept

As we've been reporting, seemingly hopeless legal challenges to UK surveillance have already notched up two wins, and revealed previously secret details about what has been going on. Now the French digital rights group La Quadrature du Net (LQDN) is taking the same approach in France: Together with FFDN, a federation of community-driven non-profit ISPs, La Quadrature du Net is bringing a legal action before the French Council of State against a decree on administrative access to online communications metadata. Through this decree, it is a whole pillar of the legal basis for Internet surveillance that is being challenged. This appeal, which builds on the European Union Court of Justice's recent decision on data retention, comes as the French government is instrumentalizing last month's tragic events to further its securitarian agenda, with an upcoming bill on intelligence services. LQDN is referring to the fact that in December 2014, the French government quietly passed an executive decree bringing in controversial surveillance measures that were passed by the French parliament a year before -- more details are given in LQDN's post. This is the first legal challenge carried out directly by La Quadrature du Net, but is unlikely to be the last: Eventually, this legal challenge will make it possible not only to formally refer the issue to the Constitutional Council, since the [new surveillance law] never underwent a constitutionality check, but also to confront existing French Law with the [Court of Justice of the EU] and the [European Court of Human Rights]'s case laws. In other words, even if the present challenge before the French Council of State fails, there are further legal avenues that can be explored afterwards, which makes the likelihood that at least one of them will be successful much higher.

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Filed Under: france, lawsuit, surveillance

Companies: ffdn, la quadrature du net, lqdn