27/07/2023, 22:38 CURIA - Documents for the general and indiscriminate retention of all traffic and location data, such as that established by Directive 2006/24, should be considered to be necessary (judgment of 5 April 2022, Commissioner of An Garda Síochána and Others, C‑140/20, EU:C:2022:258, paragraph 94). 124 In the same vein, the Court stated, in paragraph 145 of the judgment of 6 October 2020, La Quadrature du Net and Others (C‑511/18, C‑512/18 and C‑520/18, EU:C:2020:791), that even the positive obligations of the Member States which may arise, depending on the circumstances, from Articles 3, 4 and 7 of the Charter and which relate, as pointed out in paragraph 64 above, to the establishment of rules to facilitate effective action to combat criminal offences, cannot have the effect of justifying interference that is as serious as that entailed by national legislation providing for the retention of traffic and location data with the fundamental rights, enshrined in Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter, of practically the entire population, in circumstances where the data of the persons concerned are not liable to disclose a link, at least an indirect one, between those data and the objective pursued (judgment of 5 April 2022, Commissioner of An Garda Síochána and Others, C‑140/20, EU:C:2022:258, paragraph 95). 125 Furthermore, the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights of 25 May 2021, Big Brother Watch and Others v. the United Kingdom (CE:ECHR:2021:0525JUD005817013), and of 25 May 2021, Centrum för Rättvisa v. Sweden (CE:ECHR:2021:0525JUD003525208), relied on by certain governments at the hearing to argue that the ECHR does not preclude national legislation providing, in essence, for a general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data, cannot call into question the interpretation of Article 15(1) of Directive 2002/58 resulting from the foregoing considerations. Those judgments concerned the bulk interception of data relating to international communications. Thus, as the Commission observed at the hearing, the European Court of Human Rights did not rule, in those judgments, on the compatibility with the ECHR of a general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data on national territory or even a large-scale interception of those data for the purposes of the prevention, detection and investigation of serious criminal offences. In any event, it should be borne in mind that Article 52(3) of the Charter is intended to ensure the necessary consistency between the rights contained in the Charter and the corresponding rights guaranteed in the ECHR, without adversely affecting the autonomy of EU law and that of the Court of Justice of the European Union, with the result that, for the purpose of interpreting the Charter, account must be taken of the corresponding rights of the ECHR only as the minimum threshold of protection (judgment of 17 December 2020, Centraal Israëlitisch Consistorie van België and Others, C‑336/19, EU:C:2020:1031, paragraph 56). Access to data that have been retained in a general and indiscriminate way 126 At the hearing, the Danish Government argued that the competent national authorities should be able to access, for the purpose of combating serious crime, traffic and location data that have been retained in a general and indiscriminate way, in accordance with the case-law arising from the judgment of 6 October 2020, La Quadrature du Net and Others (C‑511/18, C‑512/18 and C‑520/18, EU:C:2020:791, paragraphs 135 to 139), in order to confront a serious threat to national security which is shown to be genuine and present or foreseeable. 127 It should be observed, first of all, that authorising access, for the purpose of combating serious crime, to traffic and location data which have been retained in a general and indiscriminate way would make that access depend upon circumstances unrelated to that objective, according to whether or not, in the Member State concerned, there was a serious threat to national security as referred to in the preceding paragraph, whereas, in view of the sole objective of the fight against serious crime which must justify the retention of those data and access thereto, there is nothing to justify a difference in treatment, in particular as between the Member States (judgment of 5 April 2022, Commissioner of An Garda Síochána and Others, C‑140/20, EU:C:2022:258, paragraph 97). 128 As the Court has already held, access to traffic and location data retained by providers of electronic communications services in accordance with a measure taken under Article 15(1) of Directive 2002/58, which must be given effect in full compliance with the conditions resulting from the case-law interpreting that directive, may, in principle, be justified only by the public interest objective for which those providers were ordered to retain those data. It is otherwise only if the importance of the objective https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document_print.jsf;jsessionid=A4432EEFFE3535A201E714AE6441EE66?mode=DOC&pageIndex=1&docid=265881… 25/28