Stichting De Huismeesters – Court Ruling (Netherlands, 2020)

The housing department of Groningen has a policy according to which the renting agreement can be terminated where the tenants were found to cultivate cannabis in the place allocated to them. They are then put on a list where they are banned from applying to a new housing during 3 years. The Appellant was evicted from her rental home because of her cannabis plants, a record of which was made by the housing corporation, followed by a 5-year prohibition for the Appellant to rent homes. Her personal data along with the reason for the contract termination (cannabis cultivation) was supposed to be shared with other local organizations and housing corporations according to the agreement against home cultivation of cannabis. On 17 November 2015 the Court of First Instance ruled, among others, in favor of the Appellant’s objection against the sharing of her data according to the agreement and reduced the 5-year prohibition to 2 years. Both Appellant and the Huismeersters Foundation appealed this decision in the Court of Appeals on several points. One tenant was expelled from his house on this basis and considered that the processing of his data was not compliant with the GDPR. The controller put forward Article 6(1)(b), (c) and (f) GDPR as potential legal bases. Main questions from data protection perspective were: • Is the Huismeestes Foundation allowed to share (personal) data of Appellant with other participants of the agreement because Apellant has been evicted from her social rental home due to a hemp farm? • Does a record of the reason of eviction (cannabis) constitute data relating to criminal convictions and offences according to Article 10 GDPR? The Court ruled that the record of the reason of eviction does not constitute data relating to criminal convictions and offences. In this case the record was made by assigning code 2 (2=cannabis) in the field “reason of registration”. According to the Court, this simply marks cannabis being grown in the rental home