Case Summary
The judgment concerns the legality of the UK Government’s policy to search, seize and extract data from mobile phones of migrants arriving by small boats. The Court held that the blanket policy of search and seizure of mobile phones of migrants, as well as retaining those phones after the arrests, was illegal under domestic law and the ECHR.
The case concerned assessing the legality of the practice of the UK Government to apprehend migrants arriving to the UK by small boats from France, searching their person, seizing their mobile phones, demanding PINs to unlock their phones and extracting and retaining data taken from the mobile phones of migrants.
The Court held that, in specific and different circumstances, the search and seizure of mobile phones may be legally justified. Moreover, only after examining each particular case whether the specific circumstances are present might the search of persons and seizure of mobile phones be legal, but not as a blanket policy. The Government as the defendant has made a number of concessions before the case was decided. Among other issues, the Government conceded that: the seizures were unlawful by virtue of their blanket nature and by being unpublished, and thus ‘not being in accordance with the law’ for the purpose of the ECHR Article 8 and/or Protocol 1 Article 1; the retention of data extracted from the phones for a minimum period of 3 months was disproportionate under the ECHR and data protection legislation; the policy of complete extraction of every mobile phone seized did not comply with ECHR Article 8; the obtaining of access to private material by demanding the PIN numbers of phones without any lawful authority and using a threat of prosecution for a non-existent offence to enforce the demand was a further intrusion into the ECHR Article 8 rights of the claimants.
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