AG Opinion Flags New Data Retention Compliance Risks For Irish Telecoms

AG Opinion: A new focus on data segregation

On 3 September 2026, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar delivered his Opinion in Académie Fiscale and Others (Case C-661/24) (the “Opinion”), a preliminary reference from the Belgian Constitutional Court concerning the compatibility of Belgium’s 2022 communications data retention legislation with Directive 2002/58/EC (the “ePrivacy Directive”) and the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

The key takeaway is that the Advocate General builds on the Court of Justice of the European Union’s (the “CJEU”) reasoning in La Quadrature du Net II, suggesting that the proportionality of a data retention regime should be assessed not only by reference to the categories of data retained, but also by the technical arrangements surrounding that retention. In other words, the severity of an interference with fundamental rights may depend not only on the data being retained, but also on whether technical safeguards prevent that data from being combined in a way