Αnonymous – Court Ruling (Germany, 2020)

The parties are lawyers; they are engaged in expedited proceedings for injunctive relief under unfair competition law. On 29 October 2019, the defendant addressed a letter to the Board of Directors of the Bar Association of city 1 , enclosing copies of several writs of the applicant and pointing out the suspected unethical conduct. In order to defend himself against this action, the applicant has now submitted a motion to refrain from submitting his personal data to the Bar Association. In January 2020, the regional court did not grant the application, also on the grounds that there could be no violation of the GDPR for the simple reason that the members of the bar association are bound to secrecy. This circumstance is now the subject of the present appeal. The court ruled that the appeal was unsuccessful. On the one hand, courts are authorised and, also obliged to communicate personal data ex officio to public bodies for purposes other than those of the proceedings for which the data were collected; Section 25 German Data Protection Act forms the legal basis for this. This also includes requests for arrest as well as - on an equal footing with them - also requests for injunctions as a duty to notify the competent bar association. Article 6(1)(f) GDPR does not permit such transmissions pursuant to Article 6(4) conjunction with Article 23(1) GDPR. Furthermore, the court ruled that request for an injunction is also unfounded, as there is no right to an injunction. The Regional Court had rightly rejected a claim for injunction under Section 3a of the Unfair Competition Act in conjunction with Article 79(1) GDPR. It remains to be seen whether infringements of the GDPR can be asserted by competitors at all, or whether the GDPR does not, rather, conclusively regulate the legal consequences of infringements. In any case, there is no business act within the meaning of § 2 I No. 1 Unfair Competition Act. A claim for injunction by the applicant as a competitor directl