The Court of Justice of the EU has ruled that the Data Retention Directive is unlawful in the above joined cases.

The main objective of the Data Retention Directive is to harmonise Member States’ provisions concerning the retention of certain data which are generated or processed by providers of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks. It therefore seeks to ensure that the data are available for the purpose of the prevention, investigation, detection and prosecution of serious crime, such as, in particular, organised crime and terrorism. Thus, the directive provides that the above mentioned providers must retain traffic and location data as well as related data necessary to identify the subscriber or user. By contrast,