European Court of Human Rights (ECHR): a judge who extracts personal data from a lawyer's mobile phone infringes Article 8 of the Human Rights Convention.

The case concerns the conduct of a judicial investigation by a French magistrate seconded to the Monegasque courts. The applicant is a lawyer whose client was accused by her of secretly recording a conversation during a private meal. After reporting the crime of violation of privacy, the applicant handed over her mobile phone to the police so that the recording of the crime could be examined, and her good faith proved.

The investigating judge, who had only been entrusted with the task of verifying the authenticity of the recording and examining the content of the conversation in the light of Monegasque criminal law, decided instead to initiate a wide-ranging telephone investigation, without any real limitation in terms of time or scope of the search, thus allowing an 'exploratory' investigation to be carried out.

The European Court of Human Rights held that the investigations undertaken by the investigating judge into a lawyer's mobile phone and the massive and indiscriminate retrieval of personal data, including previously deleted data, went beyond the scope of the warrant, which concerned only acts of invasion of privacy, and that these exorbitant investigations were not accompanied by safeguards respecting the applicant's status as a lawyer and professional secrecy.