In mid-September, the Prosecutor's Office instructed prosecutors to stop using telecoms data as evidence in criminal proceedings, Eesti Ekspress reported. This followed a ruling by the second-tier Tartu Circuit Court, which had declared telecoms data inadmissible as evidence, particularly in a case concerning Bigbank owner and major Isamaa donor Parvel Pruunsild.

"We will follow the position of the courts and no longer do this in our practice," said Chief State Prosecutor Taavi Pern.

According to Pern, this will make it much more difficult to investigate crimes, because in certain cases the communications data provides the only piece of information needed to proceed.

"If somebody makes a bomb threat, calls Tallinn Airport and says there is a bomb, our only lead would be the phone number from which the bomb threat was made. On the basis of this case-law, we cannot now go ahead with our proceedings and ask which person might be connected to that number, or which telephone could be connected to that number. The same is also true for common types of scams," Pern explained.

At the same time, both EU and Estonian case law has been ignored for some time. According to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), mass retention of communications data is a violation of human rights. The Supreme Court of Estonia took the same position in 2021, adding that the law would need to be amended to allow for the future use of communications data in criminal proceedings.

However, the provision in the law that obliges telecoms operators to retain data was not amended. According to Parvel Pruunsild's lawyer Paul Keres, the legislator must now get its act together and reform Estonia's Electronic Communications Act to bring it into line with EU law.

"The problem has been that the state is reluctant to do this, because if they have had a complete data goldmine up to now, then of course they don't want to constrain and commit themselves to collecting and storing less data. This is the reason that has led us to these court rulings now. They are greedy and want to keep the maximum source of information for themselves," said Keres.

Keres added that the collection of telecoms data is not illegal per se. What is illegal, he said, is the indiscriminate and all-encompassing way in which it is collected, stored and retained.

However, the Estonian Ministry of Justice is now planning to amend the law. It is not yet clear what the end result will be, but the aim is to reach a solution by the end of the year.

"A group of people has been put together, mainly under the leadership of the Ministry of the Interior, but also in cooperation with other state agencies, to analyze very clearly what our options are for changing the law, and what we can change in practice," said Laidi Surva, deputy secretary general for criminal policy at the Ministry of Justice.

"And in fact, the same concern has been taken to the European level. It is not only Estonia alone, but also other European Union countries that are struggling with this issue."

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