ANOM evidence
in Europe

Most courts that have ruled so far admit ANOM evidence: the Bundesgerichtshof and the Bundesverfassungsgericht in Germany, the Supreme Courts of Finland and Estonia, and in Australia the South Australian Court of Appeal, whose result the federal Parliament then confirmed by statute. The Memmingen Regional Court acquitted on ANOM evidence alone in 2023, and the acquittal is final. All of these decisions predate, or did not examine, the Lithuanian court files published in 2026, which show that the investigating judge in Vilnius who authorised the collection was given a false account of who built and ran the platform. The European Court of Human Rights has communicated its first ANOM cases, Raal v. Estonia and Reudolph v. Estonia, and the Hoge Raad has an ANOM cassation appeal before it.

 

ANOM was an encrypted phone service that the FBI built and distributed through undercover channels under Operation Trojan Shield. Users believed their messages were end-to-end encrypted; in fact a copy of every message went to a server the investigators controlled. US law did not allow the FBI to run the collection from US soil, so a third state hosted the server and formally authorised the copying. That state was Lithuania. After the operation was made public on 8 June 2021, the US authorities passed the data to many states through mutual legal assistance. This page summarises how courts have dealt with that material, which cases are pending, and which defence arguments have succeeded. Where our Case Law Database has an entry, the decision links to it.

 

What the Lithuanian documents show

Christian Lödden obtained and checked the Lithuanian court orders, the US mutual legal assistance requests, internal file notes and the correspondence between the FBI, US prosecutors and the Lithuanian authorities. The findings are published in Strafverteidiger (StV 2026, 441–448) and on Legal Tribune Online (7 July 2026). In short:

 

• the FBI, US prosecutors and Lithuanian police and prosecutors agreed to present ANOM to the court as a criminal network already operating in Lithuania;

• the request left out that the Lithuanian server still had to be rented and set up, replaced "decrypt" with "encrypt" in the operative passage, and removed every reference to the FBI having built the platform and modified the devices;

• on a request of 30 September 2019, an investigating judge in Vilnius authorised the covert copying of the server on 3 October 2019; four further requests and extensions repeated the same account;

• the modified devices were to be steered to specific organisations through undercover officers;

• investigators and prosecutors from Norway, Lithuania, Spain, England, Belgium and Germany were briefed at a Europol meeting in The Hague in February 2019;

• in April 2026 the US Department of Justice, in a "Motion for Inquiry Regarding Violations of Protective Orders", indirectly confirmed that the documents are authentic.

 

Background: Project Trojan Shield: how the ANOM operation deceived the courts that authorised it; ANOM leaks.

 

ANOM evidence country by country

Six jurisdictions, sorted alphabetically. For each: the highest court that has ruled on ANOM evidence, the leading decisions and the result.

 

Australia

Highest courts: Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court of South Australia and High Court of Australia. Leading decisions: Questions of Law Reserved (Nos 1 and 2 of 2023) [2024] SASCA 82, 27 June 2024; CD v Commonwealth of Australia [2025] HCA 37, 8 October 2025. Result: admitted. The Court of Appeal held that the Australian Federal Police had not intercepted communications passing over a telecommunications system, because the app sent a copy of each message to the investigators. After the High Court granted special leave, Parliament passed the Surveillance Legislation (Confirmation of Application) Act 2024. The High Court upheld that Act unanimously and revoked special leave.

 

Estonia

Highest court: Riigikohus (Supreme Court). Leading decision: Riigikohus, 16 January 2025, no. 1-21-7384. Result: admitted. The Tallinn Court of Appeal had excluded the ANOM messages because compliance with the fundamental principles of Estonian criminal procedure could not be verified. The Supreme Court reversed, relying on a presumption of lawfulness towards treaty partners and on US assurances, and convicted. The convictions now challenged in Raal and Reudolph v. Estonia followed this ruling (see below).

 

Finland

Highest court: Korkein oikeus (Supreme Court). Leading decision: KKO 2023:14, 23 February 2023. Result: admitted. The court held that the messages, sent between persons in Finland, had been obtained unlawfully because the interference with privacy and confidential communications had no basis in Finnish law. It admitted them nonetheless, because the FBI had passed the data to Finland lawfully on its own initiative and the US had consented to its use as evidence.

 

Germany

Highest courts: Bundesgerichtshof and Bundesverfassungsgericht. Leading decisions: BGH, 9 January 2025, 1 StR 54/24 (NJW 2025, 1584); BGH, 21 January 2025, 1 StR 281/24; BVerfG, 23 September 2025, 2 BvR 625/25. Result: admitted for serious offences. The BGH presumed the foreign measures lawful, held that buying an ANOM device was itself suspicious because of the price and the closed sales channel, and found no suspicionless mass surveillance. The undisclosed identity of the third state did not, in its view, breach fundamental principles. It also held that admissibility depends on the state of knowledge at the time the evidence is used. The Memmingen Regional Court took the opposite view and acquitted (21 August 2023, 1 KLs 401 Js 10121/22); the BGH dismissed the prosecution's appeal on 22 January 2025 (1 StR 107/24) because its procedural complaint was not properly pleaded, so the acquittal is final. The Munich Higher Regional Court refused an arrest warrant based on ANOM chats alone (19 October 2023, 1 Ws 525/23).

 

Netherlands

Highest court: Hoge Raad, which has not yet ruled on ANOM. Leading decisions: District Court of Oost-Brabant, 18 July 2024, ECLI:NL:RBOBR:2024:3404, and 23 June 2025, ECLI:NL:RBOBR:2025:3538. Result so far: admitted under the interstate principle of trust (interstatelijk vertrouwensbeginsel) from HR 13 June 2023, ECLI:NL:HR:2023:913. The district court did not review the foreign investigation and treated the then unnamed third state's role as technical assistance. A cassation appeal argued by JDT member Justus Reisinger now asks the Hoge Raad what follows when the foreign authorisation was obtained by misleading the judge. Our analysis.

 

Switzerland

The Federal Supreme Court has, as far as we know, not yet ruled on ANOM evidence. Leading decision: Obergericht des Kantons Aargau, 9 June 2026, SST.2025.91. Result: admitted. The court held that the data had been lawfully obtained abroad and that the surveillance would in principle also have been permissible under the Swiss Code of Criminal Procedure. It treated the reports that the Lithuanian judge had been misled as unproven; the defence had relied on press reporting.

 

Courts in Belgium, France, Italy and Montenegro have so far ruled mainly on EncroChat and SkyECC; see our EncroChat and SkyECC pages. For ANOM cases in those countries, contact the member listed below.

 

Pending cases in Strasbourg

The ECtHR has not yet ruled on an ANOM case.

 

Raal v. Estonia (no. 14711/25) and Reudolph v. Estonia (no. 14712/25)

Communicated on 12 February 2026. ANOM data was the sole or decisive evidence for convictions for drug trafficking and money laundering. The applicants complain under Art. 8 ECHR of mass surveillance without individual suspicion or verifiable authorisation, and under Art. 6 § 1 that they had no access to the authorisations and no effective way to contest admissibility. The Court's questions refer to Big Brother Watch v. United Kingdom [GC] and Yüksel Yalçınkaya v. Türkiye [GC]. Fair Trials and the ECBA have intervened as third parties. No date set. Case Law Database entry.

 

Defence approaches that have worked

Six lines of argument, each with the decision that accepted it or the authority it rests on. How much weight each one carries depends on national procedure; the member for your country can assess that.

 

1. Put the Lithuanian documents themselves before the court, not press reports, and ask it to reassess admissibility on that basis. Legal basis: BGH 1 StR 54/24 (admissibility depends on the state of knowledge at the time of use; the presumption of foreign lawfulness yields to concrete indications); HR, ECLI:NL:HR:2023:913 (concrete indications). The BGH, the BVerfG, the Riigikohus and the Dutch district courts decided without these files. The Aargau court rejected the deception argument as unproven where only press reports were before it (SST.2025.91).

2. Ask for the foreign authorisations, the US mutual legal assistance requests and the instructions for distributing the devices. Where they are withheld, argue that the prosecution bears the burden of showing that rule-of-law standards were met. Legal basis: Art. 6 ECHR; Art. 47(2) of the EU Charter. Accepted by: Landgericht Memmingen, 1 KLs 401 Js 10121/22 (exclusion; acquittal final); OLG München, 1 Ws 525/23 (no strong suspicion while the third state and its orders remained undisclosed).

3. Raise entrapment. The devices were to be steered to specific organisations through undercover officers, and the operation was run by the state. Once an entrapment claim is not wholly improbable, the prosecution must prove there was no incitement. Legal basis: Art. 6 ECHR; ECtHR [GC], Ramanauskas v. Lithuania, no. 74420/01, 5 February 2008. Factual basis: StV 2026, 441.

4. Argue that the collection was suspicionless mass surveillance: the FBI copied every message of every user, whether or not that user was suspected of anything. Legal basis: Art. 8 ECHR; ECtHR, Akgün v. Turkey, no. 19699/18, 20 July 2021, §§ 151-185 (using an encrypted messaging service does not in itself found a reasonable suspicion under Art. 5 § 1 (c) ECHR). Accepted by: Landgericht Memmingen, 1 KLs 401 Js 10121/22; OLG München, 1 Ws 525/23. The BGH disagreed (1 StR 54/24), and Raal and Reudolph raise the point in Strasbourg.

5. Oppose pre-trial detention that rests on ANOM chats alone. Accepted by: OLG München, 1 Ws 525/23 (doubtful admissibility rules out strong suspicion where the chats are the only evidence).

6. For final convictions, check whether the Lithuanian deception is a new fact that allows reopening. In the Netherlands, revision (herziening) under Art. 457(1)(c) of the Code of Criminal Procedure requires a fact unknown to the trial court that raises a serious suspicion of a more favourable outcome; whether the documents meet that threshold depends on the case. Background: ANOM before the Dutch Supreme Court.

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Background: Digital evidence cannot stand above national law; When secrecy trumps justice: the ANOM operation under scrutiny.