Veronika A – Dismissed (Austria, 2022)

The data subject divorced her husband in a proceeding before the district court (the controller), acting in its capacity as the competent land registry court. As part of the divorce, the data subject and her ex-husband concluded a court settlement on the consequences of divorce, dated 19 November 2020, covering the division of real property, spousal maintenance (waived), mutual balancing payments, division of movable assets, documents, insurance policies and provisions on further proceedings. On 21 January 2021, the data subject's legal representative applied electronically to the controller to register the property division agreed in the settlement, submitting the settlement in full without redaction. The controller granted the application and incorporated the settlement in its entirety into the land register's document collection (Urkundensammlung), which is publicly accessible for inspection by anyone under national land registry law. The data subject lodged a complaint with the Austrian DPA, arguing that the public disclosure of the settlement's full content, going beyond what was necessary to record the property rights, infringed her right to secrecy and had no legal basis under Article 6(1) GDPR. She pointed to probate proceedings, where only certain outcomes rather than full records are made public, as a contrasting example and suggested that the DPA refer the relevant provision of the land registry law to the Constitutional Court for review. The controller responded that it was legally obliged to include submitted documents in the land register in full, without discretion to redact them for data protection reasons. First, the DPA addressed its own jurisdiction. It held that although the controller was a court, its activity in maintaining the land register was not "judicial activity" within the meaning of Article 55(3) GDPR, which excludes courts' judicial functions from DPA oversight. Drawing on CJEU case-law under Article 267 TFEU, which denies preliminar