Claimant – Court Ruling (Netherlands, 2022)

The data subject made an access request to the municipality of Sluis (controller) on 18 August 2020. The controller responded on 24 September that they found no personal data related to the data subject and that it planned to reject the request. It also asked the data subject to specify their request by 9 October 2020, suspending it until that date. The data subject responded on 29 September 2020, requesting the controller to issue a decision and taking the point of view that the controller had exceeded the deadline. On 28 October 2020, the controller officially denied the request. The data subject sent another letter on 12 November 2020, requesting the controller to issue a decision based on his previous letter. On 20 December 2020, the data subject submitted a formal objection with the controller for not taking a decision for periodic penalty payments in a timely manner. The controller rejected the objection. The controller also sent the notice of objection to the court to treat as appeal. The Court initially ruled the appeal inadmissible, as the court fee had not been paid in time. The data subject objected to this decision, stating that he was not able to pay the fee. The objection was upheld on 17 September 2021. The initial ruling did not go into the request for penalty payment's. The Court found that the data subject made access requests to six other municipalities, for which the data subject also claimed penalty payments. On top of this, no clear purpose of the access request could be deduced. The data subject was not known by the controller and did not make use of the possibility to specify his request. Last, the data subject never objected to the controller's decision to deny the access request from 28 October 2020. The Court held that since data subject only made an access request and the subsequent request for a decision on periodic penalty payment's for monetary gains. Therefore, the data subject abused legal instruments. As a result, the Court ruled