In April I commented on the judgment of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg (ECJ) in joined Cases C-293/12 and C-594/12, condemning the European Data Retention Directive (2006/24/EC) as incompatible with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. Click here to read previous article.
Last week the UK Parliament passed the Data Retention and Regulatory Powers Bill. As mentioned in the April article, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union is an issue only for EU measures and national measures that implement EU measures, such as a Directive and national legislation made to implement it. Because of the ECJ ruling, the Data Retention Directive is invalid. Because the Directive is invalid, it follows that any national legislation, such as the Data Retention and Regulatory Powers Act (formerly Bill) cannot possibly be in implementation of it. And because the Data Retention and Regulatory Powers Act is not implementing EU law, it is unaffected by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. If, however any question ever arises of whether the Act is incompatible with any existing or future EU Data Protection Directive or Regulation, the Charter will be relevant in answering that question.
 
In any event we may not have heard the last of the Data Retention and Regulatory Powers Act. There might yet be issues under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). That is a different set of laws and dealt with by a different court, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Although the ECHR and EU legal regimes are separate, many of the ideas in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union were taken from the ECHR.