Leading human rights and consumer organizations have issued a letter to urge the US and the EU to protect the fundamental right to privacy.
After the Schrems decision the parties are now renegotiating the invalidated Safe Harbor arrangement. The groups warned that without significant changes to "domestic law" and "international commitments," a Safe Harbor 2.0 will almost certainly fail. NGO leaders call for a comprehensive privacy framework in the US, commitment to strong encryption and ending mass surveillance on both sides of the Atlantic.
Read the letter here.
The Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU) is taking legal action on behalf of six of its clients before the Hungarian authorities, the European Commission, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and in Israel. The organisation aims to expose the practice of unlawful secret surveillance, to have international fora declare that the Hungarian regulation of secret information gathering violates fundamental rights and to prevent politically motivated abuses.
The Strasbourg court's decision in a case from Hungary declares once and for all that uncontrolled government surveillance is incompatible with European human rights standards.
In April 2014 the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) declared invalid the Data Retention Directive that unified the rules of the retention of selective data by Internet and telephone services and determined the accessibility of data by authorities in the member states. Despite the content of the judgment, the Hungarian act allowing data retention is still in force. In October, 2014 the HCLU started litigation against two major service providers in order to force the Hungarian Constitutional Court (CC) to repeal the unlawful act.