Mr. Liam Herrick:

On behalf of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, I thank the committee for inviting us to appear today. I will make some brief introductory remarks and then hand over to Ms Elizabeth Farries, who will deal with the substance of the submission we have made. The committee will have already received a joint written submission submitted jointly by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and Digital Rights Ireland, which made a presentation to the committee last week.

As many of the members are aware the Irish Council for Civil Liberties is Ireland's leading independent human rights organisation. It monitors, educates and campaigns in order to secure full enjoyment of human rights for everyone. Founded in 1976 by Kadar Asmal and Mary Robinson and others, the ICCL has played a leading role in some of the most successful human rights campaigns over the past 40 years. These have included campaigns on police reform, the legalisation on divorce, children's rights, the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the introduction of enhanced equality legislation.

In the area of information rights, the ICCL has previously given submissions to the 2016 commissioned review of Communications (Retention of Data) Bill 2009. We have previously pursued privacy rights litigation with our colleagues from the United Kingdom, Liberty, at the European Court of Human Rights regarding the UK's surveillance systems.

We appeared before the European Court of Human Rights again last week in a case also involving an alliance of international organisations concerning the UK's continuing systems of mass surveillance today. We are also a member of an international network of civil liberties organisations, which includes 13 independent human rights organisations from the global north and global south, including, for example, the American Civil Liberties Union, which works together to promote fundamental rights and freedoms, and has identified digital information and privacy rights as central to its mandate. It is one of the most pressing international human rights issues facing human rights activists around the world today.

We affirm also the primacy of European law underpinning our submissions. Data retention and disclosure legislation must be compatible with applicable EU law as it is interpreted in light of express guarantees in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. At stake in this matter is our right to privacy guaranteed by Article 7, the protection of personal data guaranteed by Article 8, and the freedom of expression and information guaranteed by Article 11.

The independent review commissioned by the Minister for Justice and Equality gave recommendations that also affirm EU and European Convention on Human Rights, ECHR, law. The former Chief Justice Mr. John Murray headed the review, and refers in his report to two key judgements by the European Court of Justice. The first of these is the case of Digital Rights Ireland v. The Minister for Communications. That challenge, which was against the data retention regime in Ireland, was referred by the Irish High Court to the European Court of Justice, and resulted in the invalidation of Directive 2006/24/EC, the EU Data Retention Directive. The second judgement to which he refers is the judgement of the European Court of Justice in the case of Tele2 Sverige AB v.Post-Och Telestyrelsen, which, building on the Digital Rights Ireland decision, sets out strict and binding standards which must be met to make any national system of data retention permissible under EU law and under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

We welcome the general scheme of this Bill. We are fully in support of the recommendations of the Murray review. We offer these submissions in order to ensure that the recommendations in the Murray review can be fully implemented, and in our written submission we identify a number of key areas where we feel that the Bill, at this heads of Bill stage, currently does not fully meet the requirements of the recommendations.

I will now hand over to my colleague, Ms Elizabeth Farries, who will address the key substantive points which we raise in our written submission.