Annex 1: Data collection and coverage
Legal update in EU 28
The legal analysis draws on data provided by the
agency’s multidisciplinary research network, Franet,
which were collected through desk research in all
28 EU Member States, based on a questionnaire
submitted to the network.568 The main data collection
took place between August 2014 and September 2016.
Later on, the selected Member States provided FRA
with a series of monthly overviews. Franet contractors
provided their latest deliverables in June 2017.
Additional information was gathered through desk
research and exchanges with key partners, including
a number of FRA’s national liaison officers and
individual experts in various Member States. These
include Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech
Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary,
Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland,
Portugal, Romania, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
The opinions and conclusions in this report do not
necessarily represent the views of the organisations
or individuals who helped develop the report.
The FRA findings also draw on existing reports and
publications aimed at supporting national legislators in
setting up legal frameworks for the intelligence services
and their democratic oversight.569 The findings refer in
particular to the compilation of good practices issued
by Scheinin as Special Rapporteur on the promotion and
protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms
while countering terrorism.570 Additional promising
practices discussed during fieldwork are published
in this report.
The legal comparative analysis follows the structure
the ECtHR suggests for surveillance cases. So far, most
of the cases brought before the Strasbourg judges
have focused on the legality of interferences with
the right to private life – in other words, whether the
secret surveillance was “in accordance with the law”.
Following the ECtHR jurisprudence, this report presents
the safeguards that the law should put in place to
be considered compatible with the ECHR.571 These
relate to the approval mechanism of the surveillance
measure and the oversight mechanism controlling its
implementation, as well as to available remedies.
568 See FRA (2014b), FRA (2015b) and FRA (2017). See all Franet
Guidelines online.
569 See, for example, Venice Commission (2007); Council of
Europe (2016b); Born, H. and Wills, A. (eds.) (2012); Hans
Born, H., Leigh I. and Wills, A. (2015); Anderson, A. (2015).
570 UN, Human Rights Council, Scheinin, M. (2010).
571 See Cameron, I. (2013), p. 164.
Social fieldwork methodology
Research Member States
The social fieldwork is based on qualitative research
in the following seven EU Member States: Belgium,
France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and
the United Kingdom.
The selection of the Member States was determined
by a set of interrelated factors. In the 2015 report
Surveillance by intelligence services: fundamental rights
safeguards and remedies in the EU, FRA presented the
findings of the mapping of the legal frameworks in
the EU Member States that regulate surveillance by
intelligence services and their oversight. The report
presented an overview of the institutions and bodies
that operate in the field, discussing their different types,
mandates and powers. On the basis of the findings of
this institutional approach, the Member State selection
for the fieldwork stage aimed to capture the variety
of actors involved in the field of surveillance by the
intelligence services and its oversight and to cover
the whole range of different powers, mandates and
national constellations of main actors in certain Member
States. In line with this main ground, five out of the
seven Member States have detailed legislation on
general surveillance of communications. The size of
the country played a role in this context in terms of
institutions available, their number and staff working
in the institutions, their openness and availability to
discuss the issues.
Objectives
The objective of the field research was to provide
FRA with country-specific information on the practical
implementation of the national legal frameworks
governing the intelligence services with respect to
compliance with fundamental rights. The research aimed
to study how the oversight of intelligence services
was exercised in practice, to analyse the specificities
of the day-to-day work of the oversight bodies and
their effectiveness in the selected Member States. It
thus has both exploratory and explanatory aspects. The
research did not cover surveillance techniques or the
content of the data collected.
The analysis of the data collected aims to identify crosscutting and overarching issues that can be extrapolated
to other EU Member States and discussed within their
national context. The data collected and the findings
are not used to provide country-specific reports or to
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