IP case law Court of Justice

Wholly or partly by automatic means and filing system

7 preliminary rulings

Judgment of 30 Apr 2025, C-332/23 (Inspektorat kam Visshia sadeben savet)

Article 2 of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation),must be interpreted as meaning that disclosure, to a judicial body, of personal data that are protected by banking secrecy and that concern judges, public prosecutors and investigating magistrates as well as their family members, with a view to the verification of the declarations which are submitted by those judges, public prosecutors and investigating magistrates concerning their assets and those of their family members and which are published, constitutes processing of personal data that comes within the material scope of that regulation.

Judgment of 30 Apr 2025, C-313/23 (Inspektorat kam Visshia sadeben savet,)

The second subparagraph of Article 19(1) TEU, read in conjunction with Article 47 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, must be interpreted as meaning that the principle of judicial independence precludes a Member State’s practice under which the members of a judicial body of that Member State – who are elected by its parliament for terms of office of a specific duration and are competent to scrutinise the activity of judges, public prosecutors and investigating magistrates in the performance of their functions, to carry out checks in respect of their integrity and the absence of conflicts of interest on their part, as well as to propose to another judicial body the initiation of disciplinary proceedings with a view to the imposition of disciplinary penalties on those persons – continue to perform their functions beyond the legal duration of their terms of office as laid down in the Constitution of that Member State, until that parliament elects new members, where the extension of the expired terms of office does not have an express legal basis in national law containing clear and precise rules such as to circumscribe the performance of those functions and where it is not guaranteed that that extension is, in practice, limited in time.

Article 2 of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation), must be interpreted as meaning that disclosure, to a judicial body, of personal data that are protected by banking secrecy and that concern judges, public prosecutors and investigating magistrates as well as their family members, with a view to the verification of the declarations which are submitted by those judges, public prosecutors and investigating magistrates concerning their assets and those of their family members and which are published, constitutes processing of personal data that comes within the material scope of that regulation.

Judgment of 7 Mar 2024, C-740/22 (Endemol Shine Finland Oy)

Article 2(1) and Article 4(2) of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation)must be interpreted as meaning that the oral disclosure of information on possible ongoing or completed criminal proceedings to which a natural person has been subject constitutes processing of personal data, within the meaning of Article 4(2) of that regulation, and comes within the material scope of that regulation where that information forms part of a filing system or is intended to form part of a filing system.

Judgment of 16 Jul 2020, C-311/18 (Facebook Ireland and Schrems)

Article 2(1) and (2) of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation), must be interpreted as meaning that that regulation applies to the transfer of personal data for commercial purposes by an economic operator established in a Member State to another economic operator established in a third country, irrespective of whether, at the time of that transfer or thereafter, that data is liable to be processed by the authorities of the third country in question for the purposes of public security, defence and State security.

Judgment of 14 Feb 2019, C-345/17 (Buivids)

Article 3 of Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data must be interpreted as meaning that the recording of a video of police officers in a police station, while a statement is being made, and the publication of that video on a video website, on which users can send, watch and share videos, are matters which come within the scope of that directive.

Judgment of 16 Dec 2008, C-73/07 (Satakunnan Markkinapörssi and Satamedia)

Article 3(1) of Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data is to be interpreted as meaning that an activity in which data on the earned and unearned income and the assets of natural persons are:– collected from documents in the public domain held by the tax authorities and processed for publication,– published alphabetically in printed form by income bracket and municipality in the form of comprehensive lists,– transferred onward on CD-ROM to be used for commercial purposes, and – processed for the purposes of a text-messaging service whereby mobile telephone users can, by sending a text message containing details of an individual’s name and municipality of residence to a given number, receive in reply information concerning the earned and unearned income and assets of that person, must be considered as the ‘processing of personal data’ within the meaning of that provision.

Activities involving the processing of personal data such as those referred to at points (c) and (d) of the first question and relating to personal data files which contain solely, and in unaltered form, material that has already been published in the media, fall within the scope of application of Directive 95/46.

Judgment of 6 Nov 2003, C-101/01 (Bodil Lindqvist)

The act of referring, on an internet page, to various persons and identifying them by name or by other means, for instance by giving their telephone number or information regarding their working conditions and hobbies, constitutes ‘the processing of personal data wholly or partly by automatic means’ within the meaning of Article 3(1) of Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data.


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