The European Court of Justice on the EU-Canada passenger name record agreement

This analysis examines the challenging balance between the rights to privacy and data protection, on the one hand, and national security needs, on the other hand, as framed in Opinion 1/15 of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on the draft agreement between Canada and the European Union dealing with the transfer of PNR data. Moving from this case-study and taking into account past landmark judgments on data retention and data exchange, such as Digital Rights Ireland, Schrems and Tele2 Sverige, this work argues that the ECJ is increasingly managing to take a right-oriented stance, without disregarding actual needs to protect public security. In this much-awaited decision, the ECJ held that, as a matter of principle, mass surveillance is not incompatible with EU law. Nonetheless, it laid down strict conditions to be respected in practice in order not to impair the rights to privacy and data protection, enshrined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.