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 preliminary-reference status to national courts acting as commercial-register authorities rather than adjudicating a genuine dispute, the DPA reasoned that a land registry court, in maintaining a public register of rights in rem, performs an analogous administrative rather than adjudicative function. The DPA therefore held that it had jurisdiction to examine the complaint. Second, on the merits, the DPA held that the disclosure was lawful because it was legally mandated. It found that the land register, including its document collection, is public under national land registry law and that documents submitted as the basis for a registration, including a court settlement, must be attached and included in full. The controller had no legal discretion to review submissions for data protection concerns or to abridge them. The DPA noted that partial submission of a divorce settlement is legally permitted only in narrowly defined statutory exceptions, none of which had been invoked here and that the data subject had in any event submitted the settlement in its entirety herself. The DPA cited Austrian Supreme Court case-law confirming that a divorce settlement must be reproduced in full for land registry purposes, other than through simple redaction/striking-out in specific circumstances. Finally, the DPA held that it lacked competence to assess whether the underlying land registry provisions were themselves compatible with the fundamental right to data protection or with EU law, such review was reserved to the Constitutional Court under Article 140 B-VG or the CJEU under Article 267 TFEU and the DPA had no legal basis to refer the matter to either body itself. Since the disclosure was legally mandated, the DPA rejected the complaint as unfounded.