"The Portuguese Constitutional Court has declared a new data retention law proposal to be unconstitutional. The law proposed, among other things, general and indiscriminate retention of people’s telecommunications data – like traffic and location data – for up to six months for the purpose of investigating serious crime.
The proposal had been approved in the Parliament and it was supposed to replace the previous data retention law invalidated by the same court in 2022. The law was declared invalid following a complaint presented to the Justice Ombudsman by EDRi Member D3 – Defesa dos Direitos Digitais, in 2017.
In response to the Constitutional Court’s decision, the Parliament has swiftly approved another dubious data retention regime in the beginning of 2024, which might face the same fate of being declared unconstitutional…for the third time."
"On January 5 2024 a new law proposal was approved in the plenary.
However, as argued by D3, the new data retention regime is not any less problematic. The new law does not dictates a data retention scheme directly, but allows it through an authorisation from a special section of the Supreme Court. It will be up to the Supreme Court to define the terms of each data retention authorisation, with the law solely requiring them to be proportional and for the purpose of investigating serious crime. The law does not set duration limits, specific legal grounds for data retention to be authorised, or the criteria for it to be considered proportional."
