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Don’t believe the FT: Germany’s top court DID NOT “overturn EU data law”

Posted on March 2, 2010 | Filed Under communication technologies 

Is this “quality journalism”? The Financial Times reports that “Germany’s top court overturns EU data law”; the article goes on to claim that the Court “has struck down as ‘inadmissible’ a central piece of European security legislation.” Which is, of course, pure nonsense and contrary to the facts (as you know if you read my previous post or most online news sources). The Associated Press at least got the right direction, even if it doesn’t seem to be familiar with basic principles of EU law, as it claimed that “the court upheld the EU directive as necessary to fight terror”, which is beyond even a German court’s competence.

Update (3 March 2010): Meanwhile, the Financial Times has revised its article; the part about the court having “struck down… a central piece of European security legislation” is now gone. However, the wrong headline is still there, and the (new) message that the “highest court in Germany ruled on Tuesday that a central plank of antiterrorist security legislation in the European Union, requiring the storage of at least six months’ worth of telephone and internet data, was contrary to the country’s fundamental law” is wrong again, because the German Constitutional Court explicitely said the exact opposite: the directive requiring storage of data was not the problem, rather the rules for access to and use of the data.

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