Ministerio Fiscal, Case C-207/16, CJEU (Grand Chamber), 2 October 2018

Public authorities’ access to data for the purpose of identifying the owners of SIM cards activated with a stolen mobile telephone.

Directive 2002/58/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 12 July 2002 concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector 
Art. 7 EUCFR
Art. 8 EUCFR

In accordance with the principle of proportionality, whether the access of public authorities to personal data for reasons related to the fight against crime does not imply serious interference with the fundamental rights to privacy and to the protection of personal data, the existence of a serious crime is not required for the purpose of the legitimacy of both the access itself and the objective pursued by it. A measure allowing the competent national authorities to access the identification data of the holders of the numbers activated with a stolen mobile phone for a limited period does not represent a hypothesis of serious interference with the fundamental rights. Consequently, it may be justified by the objective of fighting criminal offences generally. (Request for a preliminary ruling concerning the interpretation of Article 15(1) of Directive 2002/58/EC, that followed the decision of a local court of preliminary investigation which had refused to grant the police access to personal data retained by providers of electronic communications services).

• The Court solves the case by recalling the consequential relationship between the objective pursued by the authorities and the gravity of the interference, which had already been stated in the Tele2 Sverige ruling. According to it, on the basis of the principle of proportionality, only the fight against serious crime legitimizes a serious interference with the rights to privacy and data protection.
• It has to be noted that the referring court asked the Court to clarify the notion of the seriousness of a criminal offence capable of justifying the access to the data. The Court highlights that a preventive examination of the seriousness of the interference is necessary in order to establish which criterion should be used to determine the seriousness of a crime. This reasoning led the Court to refrain from defining the criteria determining the seriousness of the crime, which were no longer necessary having found, in the present case, a minor interference.