[JURIST] Privacy advocates in the Netherlands on Wednesday urged the District Court of The Hague[official website] to issue a preliminary injunction and declare unconstitutional the nation’s data-retention law. The law [text, in Dutch], enacted in 2009, allows [WSJ report] the Dutch government to retain telephone and Internet data of citizens for up to 12 months for the alleged purpose of fighting terrorism and organized crime. The government is currently attempting to amend the law in response to last year’s invalidation of an EU-wide data retention policy on which the Dutch law is based. On Monday the government-funded privacy watchdog, the Dutch Data Protection Authority [official website], issued a statement [text] recommending that the bill not be presented to Parliament because “the need to retain all telephony and internet data in the Netherlands is insufficiently substantiated.” The court is expected to rule on the law on March 11.
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