Original article (in Albanian) was published on 29/10/2024; Author: Pustina Patris
Claim: The European Court of Human Rights has decided that SKY Encrochat interceptions can be used as evidence
Verdict: Context missing
A decision by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, regarding the collection of data from the EncroChat application, has been misrepresented by some Albanian-language media as endorsing the use of this data as evidence.
This news has drawn considerable attention from the Albanian public, as it has been described as having an impact on SPAK investigations based on conversations decrypted in France using these applications, as well as in the lawsuit filed in the Constitutional Court requesting the dismissal of this evidence by one of the defendants.
Meanwhile, the case before the Strasbourg court involves a lawsuit against the French state, submitted by two British citizens accused of using EncroChat in criminal proceedings against them. The lawsuit focuses on the collection of EncroChat user data by French authorities and the subsequent transfer of this data to UK authorities under a European Investigation Order (EIO).
EncroChat is an encrypted communication application that operated as a closed network and was secretly distributed from 2016 to 2020.
In its ruling titled ‘Decision on the inadmissibility of the lawsuit against France‘, which Faktoje.al reviewed on the official website of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the court clearly explained that it rejected the case without considering it because the plaintiffs had not exhausted all domestic legal remedies in France. This is a key rule for the operation of the international court, where any case must first have gone through all legal channels in the country where the alleged violation took place.
According to the ruling, French law, specifically Article 694-41 of the Criminal Procedure Code, allowed the plaintiffs to contest the use of data obtained through a European Investigation Order (EIO) in a domestic court, arguing that the methods of data collection violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right to privacy.
‘Such a solution, if successful, could lead to a finding of a violation of Article 8 of the Convention and the exclusion, in France, of evidence obtained through the implementation of the EIO,’ the ECtHR ruling states.
At no point in the ruling does the Court address the legitimacy of the data obtained from EncroChat. On the contrary, as highlighted in the previous excerpt, the Court has left open the possibility that this data could be considered inadmissible as evidence by local courts.
