Mass hacking and fundamental rights: a missed opportunity for the CJEU?

Hugo Partouche, Attorney-at-law
(avocat) at the Paris Bar, and Chloé Berthélémy, Senior Policy Advisor,
EDRi

 

Photo credit: hacker-silhoutte,
via Wikimedia
commons

 

*A first version of this article
was published in French by Actualité Juridique (AJ) Pénal, Dalloz Revues
here.

 

On 30 April 2024, the Court of
Justice of the European Union (CJEU) published its decision
in the ‘EncroChat’ case.

 

The case emerged from recent
European police cooperation operations against organised crime, involving the
mass interception of encrypted communications by means of spyware (‘hacking’).
They enabled the collection, for EncroChat alone, of millions of messages
associated with 32,000 users in 122 countries, including nearly 4,600 in
Germany, and leading to more than 6,500 arrests and 3,800 legal proceedings in
the Union.