Judgment Approved by the court for handing down. Davis & Ors v SSHD “This Directive aims to harmonise Member States’ provisions concerning the obligations of the providers of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks with respect to the retention of certain data which are generated or processed by them, in order to ensure that the data are available for the purpose of the investigation, detection and prosecution of serious crime, as defined by each Member State in its national law.” 32. The Data Retention Directive specified the categories of data to be retained and imposed certain requirements relating to the security and storage of retained data. Article 6 imposed an obligation on each Member State to ensure that the specified communications data were retained by telecommunications providers for periods of not less than six months and not more than two years. 33. Article 4 of the Data Retention Directive provided that: “Member States shall adopt measures to ensure that data retained in accordance with this Directive are provided only to the competent national authorities in specific cases and in accordance with national law. The procedures to be followed and the conditions to be fulfilled in order to gain access to retained data in accordance with necessity and proportionality requirements shall be defined by each Member State in its national law, subject to the relevant provisions of European Union law or public international law, and in particular the ECHR as interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights.” Ireland v European Parliament and Council 34. In Case C-301/06 Ireland v. European Parliament & Council (ECLI:EU:C:2009:68; [2009] 2 CMLR 37) Ireland sought to argue before the CJEU that the Data Retention Directive was invalid and that it could not properly have been based on former Article 95 EC, because its principal focus was not the functioning of the internal market but the investigation, detection and prosecution of crime. That argument was rejected by the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice. The Court observed that: “…the Community legislature may have recourse to Article 95 EC in particular where disparities exist between national rules which are such as to obstruct the fundamental freedoms or to create distortions of competition and thus have a direct effect on the functioning of the internal market”. 35. It found that Article 95 EC was the correct legal basis for the Data Retention Directive, in particular because: (a) “the differences between the various national rules adopted on the retention of data relating to electronic communications were liable to have a direct impact on the functioning of the internal market” and “such a situation justified the Community legislature in pursuing the objective of safeguarding the proper functioning of the internal market through the adoption of harmonised rules”;