Criminal Justice and Data Protection: Communication Metadata under EU Human Rights Law (Routledge-Giappichelli Studies in Law)

The use of traffic and location data in criminal justice is now a common prac-tice in the EU and beyond.Although metadata do not reveal the contents of communications, they allow to draw precise conclusions on the private lives of users, like their everyday habits, places of residence, daily movements and ac-tivities, social relationships, and frequented environments.For this reason, they are largely used by law enforcement to identify promising targets of investiga-tion or as evidence in criminal trials.In the EU, national legislation often pro-vides for the indiscriminate retention of such data, but the compatibility of these mass surveillance regimes with the European human rights framework has been questioned in the case law of the European Court on Human Rights (ECtHR) and the European Court of Justice (CJEU), as well as legal scholar-ship.Nevertheless, the use of unlawfully retained data in criminal proceedings is not usually sanctioned in national criminal procedural systems.Thi