On October 27, 2015, the European Court of Human Rights (Court) ruled in R.E. v. United Kingdom that the covert surveillance of legal consultations between detainees and their lawyers violated Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence) of the European Convention on Human Rights (Convention). According to the press release, in the course of his detention in May 2010, authorities failed to provide R.E.’s attorneys assurances that their consultations would be confidential. R.E. brought suit alleging the domestic regime governing surveillance of consultations violated Article 8 of the Convention. The Court “consider[ed] that the surveillance of a legal consultation constitutes an extremely high degree of intrusion into a person’s right to respect for his or her private life and correspondence” and could therefore only be justified if the measure was “‘in accordance with the law’, in pursuit of a legitimate aim, and ‘necessary in a democratic society.’” The Court found that the domestic laws governing the types of persons and offenses, as well as the provisions relating to duration, renewal and cancellation of surveillance were sufficiently clear. However, the guidelines relating to storage, secure handling, and destruction of material gathered through covert surveillance had not been implemented until June 2010, a month after R.E.’s detention.  Therefore, the Court concluded that “the surveillance measures, insofar as they may have been applied to him, did not meet the requirements of Article 8 § 2 of the Convention.”