Plaintiff – Court Ruling (Netherlands, 2021)

The plaintiff requested the defendant, the Board of Directors of the Uitvoeringsinstituut werknemersverzekeringen (UWV, Employee Insurance Agency), to provide access to phone notes and the deletion of these notes. The plaintiff was granted access to the phone notes pursuant Article 15 of the GDPR, but the defendant did not delete them. The defendant argued that the GDPR and the Archive Act must be seen in relation to each other. The phone notes were part of the file that was kept by the defendant in order to carry out their official authority (Article 6(1)(e) GDPR) and had to be saved for the required retention periods according to the Archive Act, which is an exemption from the Article 17 GDPR right to erasure. The plaintiff argued that the processing of the phone notes was not necessary, but the court agreed with the position of the defendant: because the plaintiff made an application for unemployment benefits, initial processing of the phone notes was lawful. Pursuant to Article 30 of the Wet structuur uitvoeringsorganisatie werk en inkomen (Work and Income Implementation organisation Structure Act) the defendant had a duty in the public interest and could therefore base the processing of personal data on Article 6(1)(e) GDPR. The court held that pursuant to Article 17(3) GDPR there is no obligation for a government body to erase personal data if it is subject to a statutory processing obligation. The court also held that there was no obligation to delete plaintiff's personal data from the phone notes pursuant to Article 5(1)(e) GDPR, because Article 3 of the Archives Act precludes the later modification of archival documents.