Financiarul

The Constitutional Court of Romania (CCR) ruled by a majority of votes on Thursday that the provisions of the Law No. 298/20008 on phone data storage is unconstitutional. Thus, the Constitutional Court”s judges accepted the exception the Commissariat for Civil Society raised in a lawsuit against a mobile phone company.

The exception of non-constitutionality refers to the provisions of the Law No. 298/20008 on holding details of everyone”s telephone and internet communications generated or processed by the telephony and internet suppliers to civilian users, as well as to the alteration of the Law No. 506/2004 on processing the private data and the protection of the private life in e-communications.

The Civil Society Commissariat litigated the mobile telephony company for the latter should observe the contractual terms on the phone calls confidentiality. The Civil Society Commissariat contested the Law No. 298/20008 arguing it violates the provisions of some Constitutional articles on the basic human rights, such for instance the Art 28 on the confidentiality of the correspondence Art, 26 on the private family life, Art 25 on the free movement, Art 30 on the freedom of expression.

“If the cause is won, the law on phone tapping will be annulled and it will set a precedent for the entire Europe, namely for all the countries that unreservedly adopted such a law,” Civil Society Commissariat release reads. The Organization opines that through adopting such a law, the Constitution is violated and it enables the repressive bodies to bug phone calls abusively, without relying on any legal authorization.”

According to the Law No. 298/20008 whose enactment was postponed by December 31, the land and mobile telephony operators had, starting January, to store certain data of the phone calls, for six months.

The law stipulated that the network services and e-communications suppliers had to tape and preserve certain generated or processed data and put them at the disposal of the relevant authorities investigating and pursuing serious crime activities.

The law were to be enacted only for the data required to locate the individuals and the companies and the related data helping with spotting the subscriber or the internet user, whose calls were taped. In case of the emails and the online phone calls, the Internet suppliers had to tape and store, starting March 15, 2009 data about where to the emails were sent, the date and time the user accessed the internet, to whom the email was sent, the IP address, the name and the user”s postal address, as well as the date and time when they shut down the computer