Feedback on the EU Impact Assessment on Data Retention for Criminal Proceedings: Synergies with the European Trade Indexes Registry (EUTIR) Framework

This document presents formal feedback to the European Commission on its Impact Assessment for Data Retention in Criminal Proceedings. It argues that the proposed framework can be significantly enhanced by integrating it with the European Trade Indexes Registry (EUTIR), a proposed horizontal digital trust infrastructure. The feedback demonstrates how EUTIR’s technical architecture’featuring immutable metadata records, certified service providers (CSPs), verifiable identifiers (LEI/vLEI/EORI), and a pull-based access model’can provide a proportionate, privacy-respecting, and interoperable solution for law enforcement to access non-content data. It positions EUTIR as a synergistic “supply-side” infrastructure that ensures legal certainty, reduces compliance burdens for providers, safeguards fundamental rights, and enables seamless cross-border cooperation, thereby addressing the fragmentation and challenges highlighted in the data retention impact assessment.