Committee judgment concerning Bosnia and Herzegovina
In the case of Nezirić v. Bosnia and Herzegovina the Court held that there had been a violation of the right to respect for correspondence.
The case concerned the seizure and examination of a lawyer’s mobile phone in the context of a criminal investigation against him.
The Court was particularly concerned about the practical framework for the protection of legal professional privilege in cases such as this. The applicant’s phone was seized in his office and its entire contents copied, transferred and examined elsewhere, without either the applicant or a member of the Bar Association present. The data retrieved had subsequently been sifted through, but without any judicial supervision. Moreover, the entire copied contents of the phone had ultimately been submitted as evidence at trial, and not the sifted data.