ENCROCHAT D-DAY: European Court of Human Rights to deliver judgement on two British users' appeals today

Two EncroChat defendants will today hear if their appeals to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), against how the UK obtained the mobile phone data from France, have been successful.

French and Dutch police were able to infiltrate the supposedly secure EncroChat mobile phone system in April 2020 before monitoring the past and ongoing communications between thousands of users until June that year.

There were 60,000 users worldwide, with about 9,000 in the UK.

Law enforcement agencies argued that it was almost exclusively used by organised criminals, who thought they were safe to communicate about drug supply and even murders.

However, their historic messages were obtained and ongoing communications monitored.

The French provided the UK National Crime Agency (NAC) with all the data from users in the UK and allowed it to access ongoing communications.

The two EncroChat defendants, referred to as AL and EJ, born in 1990 and 1965, respectively lodged challenges with the ECHR.

EJ has already been convicted and jailed for drug supply offences, while AJ has yet to have his trial, which has been held up, pending the outcome of the ECHR case.

A notice by the court, ahead of the judgement being published today, said: "Both cases concern the remote retrieval of user data from the EncroChat encrypted telecommunications service and their sharing with the UK law-enforcement authorities.

"EncroChat was an encrypted telecommunications service for use on mobile phones, more than 66,000 copies of

which were distributed covertly from 2016 to 2020, and which was used by criminal organisations.

"Relying on Article 8 (right to respect for private life), the applicants complain that the French authorities retrieved data remotely from all devices connected to the EncroChat network and that the data collected in the United Kingdom was transferred to the UK authorities.

"They question both the quality of the legislative provisions on remote data retrieval and the necessity of such interference.

"Relying on Articles 6 (right to a fair trial) and 13 (right to an effective remedy), they also submit that there was no remedy available to them by which they might have effectively challenged the decisions authorising the data retrieval in question."

More than 3,000 people in the UK have been arrested in connection with EncroChat, with more than 1,500 charged and several already convicted.

A series of legal challenges in the UK over the admissibility of the evidence and how it was obtained have been dismissed.

Main image: An earlier EncroChat protest outside a British crown court.