Bigbank Chair Parvel Pruunsild is asking the court to order the Estonian state to pay a fine for the illegal storage of his communications data. According to preliminary calculations, the compensation due could amount to €70 million. However, according to Paul Keres, a partner at the law firm Levin, which is representing Pruunsild, it should be noted that their claim is not exactly for that.

"Parvel Pruunsild has filed a claim for damages, in order that the court, in its discretion, according to its own conscience, should award some kind of fair compensation," said Keres. "But this is entirely justified on the grounds that if a person's fundamental rights are being deliberately violated at the behest of the state, why should they not go to court? They should. And the state has to deal with this mess," Keres explained.

For Carri Ginter, a sworn attorney and associate professor at the University of Tartu, it was surprising that Pruunsild decided to take this route, even though legally everything makes perfect sense. According to Ginter, European case law has been clear since at least 2014 in stating that the obligation imposed on telecoms operators to collect and store data on a mass scale violates people's fundamental rights. Therefore, in his opinion, the relevant section of Estonia's Electronic Communications Act ought to be removed.

"The state must not treat all its citizens as potential criminals. And because this practice is very long-standing, it is recurrent, the Estonian state has also lost in the European Court of Justice in the dogfighting case. We have known for a long time under very different governments that what we are doing is illegal and yet we have left this section in place for pragmatic reasons," Ginter said.

According to Ginter, it has been difficult for the state to give it up because the use of communications data has up to now provided an easy way to catch petty thieves and detect minor crimes.

The Estonian Ministry of Justice, however, takes a different view, arguing that communications data is not only used in criminal proceedings, but also to ensure national security, which is why it has been difficult to move forward with the amendment.

"We have analyzed different options in cooperation with various authorities and tried to find solutions that would, on the one hand, meet the need of the authorities to fulfil their statutory tasks and, on the other hand, so that this new regulation or possible regulation would also be in line with the case law of the European Court of Justice," explained Markko Künnapu, the Ministry of Justice's advisor on criminal law.

"Rare are those cases where data from a very long time before the crime, for example a year, is required. But from the point of view of ensuring national security, it is certainly necessary to keep this kind of data, which could help to ensure security, for as long as possible," said Chief State Prosecutor Taavi Pern.

Lawyers have pointed out that no one has told the Estonian state that the data should not be collected or used at all, but that its collection and use has to be proportionate. It is difficult to say at this stage how many other similar complaints might follow Pruunsilld's. In principle, this step could be taken by everyone in Estonia.

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