Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled on Tuesday that some of the methods used by the country’s police to collect and store data are unconstitutional.
The Constitutional Court ruled that secret surveillance extending to a suspect’s contacts is a serious infringement, and that the safeguards in current German criminal law are insufficient to establish proximity to the underlying crime or threat under investigation.
New limits to the storage of personal data by the police are also necessary, the court ruled. For example, previous allegations alone against a person are not sufficient to establish a sufficiently probable link with future criminal offences.
The civil rights organization GFF took the lawsuit to court, arguing that concrete constitutional standards are needed for data collection and storage.
The complainants included lawyers, a political activist and two football fans who had ended up in police databases.
The GFF celebrated the ruling as a “success for civil liberties” and said it will strengthen people’s rights to control their own data.
The group called on German politicians to draft new laws that define police surveillance powers more specifically and precisely.
The Constitutional Court already scrapped parts of the law on police surveillance powers in 2016. Lawmakers revised the statute in 2017 in response to the ruling, but Tuesday’s court ruling again highlighted constitutional problems with the latest version of the law.