Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights prescribes that everyone has the right to respect for his or her private life. A restriction of this right presupposes that the law of the Contracting State achieves certain requirements which include the need for the restrictive measure to be necessary in a democratic society. This thesis examines the case law of the European Court of Human Rights regarding secret surveillance. The thesis concludes that the European Court has established further requirements regarding these particularly intrusive measures, which consist of various minimum safeguards concerning the substantive national law. Sweden introduced a new method of secret surveillance, hemlig dataavläsning, in April 2020. This new covert surveillance measure enables the authorities to breach the systems of different types of technical equipment, to retrieve stored personal information within. The main purpose of this thesis is to analyse and determine if the Swedish law of secret data interception meets the requirement set out in the case law. The thesis concludes that the Swedish law does not meet all the requirements set out by the European Court of Human Rights. The Swedish law does not with sufficient clarity define the offences which justifies the application of the covert surveillance. The law also prescribes an authorization procedure which lack sufficient safeguards regarding the independence of the decision-making authority. Furthermore, the law does not regulate the technology and methods used for the action, and there is no legal requirement for the national court to take these into account in its decision-making. Lastly, the Swedish legislation stipulates that the individual does not need to be notified about the surveillance if there is any confidentiality regarding the information about the surveillance one year after the preliminary investigation. In these cases, the supervisory authority must safeguard the interests of the individual, which due to the lack of legally binding decisions, are not sufficient. Finally, the thesis outlines various solutions to address these problems, which consist of inter alia: that the Swedish law should set higher requirements for the severity of crimes that can justify the use of the secret coercive measure; the removal of the interim decisions of prosecutors; a legal requirement that the court in its assessment must consider and decide on the technology used to execute the surveillance; and lastly, a legal requirement that the individual should be notified about the surveillance as soon as this is possible, or alternatively, an increase of power to the supervisory authority.

In recent years Sweden has been affected by an increase in organized crime, bombings, and deadly gun violence. Government surveillance measures for the purpose of preventing crime, i.e., before a concrete criminal suspicion arises, have thus become a more common practice within the work of law enforcement authorities. The act (2007:979) on measures to prevent certain particularly serious crimes(hereinafter referred to as“Preventivlagen”)is of particular importance for this preventive kind of secret surveillance measures. The purpose of this research paper is to investigate whether Preventivlagen contains adequate protection and safeguards for the freedoms and rights of individuals' privacy according to the Swedish Instrument of Government (1974:152) (hereinafter referred to as“Regeringsformen”) and the European Convention on human rights, Article 8 the right to privacy and Article 13 the right to effective legal remedies. A further aim was to examine if the law in question needs to be improved with respect to privacy protection. In addition, the new bill in SOU 2022:52 which proposes to expand Preventivlagen, was also reviewed in terms of privacy protection. In conclusion, Preventivlagen generally is foreseeable in terms of the scope of application for the use of secret surveillance measures. Furthermore, it also mostly contains adequate safeguards. However, there are certain parts that can be improved. When a proportionality assessment was made according to the requirements of the European Convention and Regeringsformen, it was concluded that Preventivlagen partly lacks some basic safeguards regarding individuals' right to notification and effective legal remedies. Also, the supervision exercised by the Privacy Protection Board was deemed insufficient. Therefore, Preventivlagen may constitute a disproportionate intervention in the individual's right to privacy in Article 8 and the right to effective legal remedies in Article 13, as well as ch. 2. § 6 Regeringsformenwhich also protects the right to privacy. It was therefore proposed that the shortcomings of the law be addressed by the legislature. The new draft bill SOU 2022:52 was also described and analyzed. In the bill, it is proposed that the catalog of crimes in Preventivlagen be expanded and that the use of excess information becomes unlimited. The conclusion in this part was that an expansion of the crime catalog and the possibility of unlimited use of excess information can have an impact on the proportionality and foreseeability aspect of the law. It was therefore proposed that the legislator strengthen the safeguards in Preventivlagen to further ensure privacy protection if these changes are introduced.