George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I have seen those reports, Senator Ludlam, and—with no disrespect intended to the district court in The Hague—you might care to reflect that there are perhaps thousands of courts of inferior jurisdiction within the nations of the European Community. If the best you can do to advance your argument is to light upon one isolated decision by a district court in The Hague then you are not doing very well.

The significant thing is that, when the European Data Retention Directive was struck down by the European human rights commission in April of last year, the human rights commission—as you should know, Senator, but apparently do not—struck that data directive down on the basis of proportionality. In its reasons for judgement, the European Court of Human Rights held that a properly expressed data retention directive was consistent with human rights principles.