Short BIO

Gordon Nardell QC is a barrister at 39 Essex Street Chambers in London, specialising in public law and human rights. He previously practised at the former European Commission of Human Rights and the Legal Affairs Directorate of the Council of Europe and was a member of the drafting team for the 1998 UK Human Rights Act. Gordon has acted in several high-profile information rights cases in UK and European jurisdictions, including Liberty and others v. UK and S. and Marper v. UK in the European Court of Human rights. He was a contributor to CPDP 2009.

CPDP Conference 2011 presentation

Soft Surveillance, Hard Cases – how national courts are shaping the future of European data retention

In a series of decisions from 2008 onwards, the courts in a number of Member States, from Bulgaria to Ireland, have been highly critical of national laws implementing the Data Retention Directive 2006/24/EC, finding breaches of privacy rights under domestic constitutional law and the European Convention of Human Rights. In only of the cases – the Irish High Court’s decision of May 2010 – has a question been referred to the European Court of Justice, and its ruling is not expected for some time. Are these decisions a little local difficulty for the Member States concerned, Or do they go to the heart of data retention at European level? This presentation will look at the effect of these decisions on the current reform agenda.

On-line publications

1. “Levelling up: Data privacy and the European Court of Human Rights” in Data Protection in a Profiled World (Gutwirth and others, eds., Springer, 2010) http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-90-481-8864-2#section=745446&page=1 .

2. “Watching the detectives”, The Guardian, 12 January 2011 (reaction to revelations that police officers had acted as covert human intelligence sources in the environmental protest movement) http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jan/12/watching-the-detectives-mark-kennedy

3. “Habeas corpus: a human rights lawyer’s perspective” – paper for a Venice Commission/EU Central Asia Rule of Law Initiative round table event in Uzbekistan, September 2010 http://www.39essex.com/docs/articles/nardell_tashkent_paper_final_27_8_10.pdf