Companies facing dawn raids across Europe lost an important shield this summer. The Court of Justice of the EU ruled on 16 July 2026 that national competition authorities may seize employees’ business emails during unannounced inspections without first securing a judge’s approval, provided the power rests on clear law and full judicial review afterwards.
The Grand Chamber judgment came in three joined Portuguese cases, led by Imagens Medicas Integradas, where the country’s regulator copied emails exchanged by managers during dawn raids and relied on a warrant from the public prosecutor rather than a court. The firms argued that grabbing correspondence without prior judicial control breached their fundamental rights to privacy.
The Court disagreed on the core point. It accepted that reading employees’ emails touches privacy, yet it held that the intrusion is outweighed by the public interest in undistorted competition. Regulators, in other words, can act first and justify later, so long as the seizure follows clear law, stays strictly limited, and remains open to challenge before a judge.
That freedom is not unlimited, and the ruling drew a sharper line than the headlines suggest. Where an inspection reaches a personal or mixed-use device, such as a private phone that also holds work messages, authorities may need prior review by a court or an independent body before they look. The distinction between company hardware and personal property now carries real legal weight.
For enforcers the outcome is a clear win. Antitrust cases increasingly turn on digital evidence, and a demand to seek a warrant for every mailbox would slow raids to the point where suspects could delete the very messages investigators want. National authorities from Lisbon to Warsaw will read the decision as a green light to keep grabbing emails on the day.
For companies and their lawyers the message is to prepare, not to protest. The Court left defence rights intact after the fact, so businesses can still contest what regulators seize, argue that specific documents fall outside the inspection’s scope, or invoke legal privilege. The fight simply moves from the doorstep to the courtroom.
The wider significance lies in how the judges balanced two values they usually guard together. Privacy and effective enforcement both sit in the EU Charter, and here the Court ranked competition policy above a procedural guarantee that many national systems treat as sacred. That ranking will echo through data-protection and criminal-procedure debates far beyond antitrust.
The practical upshot is that dawn raids in Europe just became harder to resist and easier to run. Firms that once counted on procedural delay now face regulators empowered to seize first, with personal devices as the one place the Court still asks them to knock before entering.
