College van Burgemeester en Wethouders Den Haag – Court Ruling (Netherlands, 2022)

This case is between a data subject and the city government of The Hague (the controller). In 2019, the data subject requested access to her personal data pursuant to Article 15 GDPR. The controller partially complied with the request on 6 November 2019, after which the data subject claimed that not all information within the scope of her access request had been provided to her. Eventually, on 15 December 2020, the controller provided her with more documents. According to the data subject, however, this was not enough because the scope of her access request included all e-mails that were sent by the (so-called) “youth director”. This is a government employee who functions as a main contact person between a family and the different governmental agencies. The city government, however, stated that these emails could no longer be found in the system, since the respective youth director is no longer employed, and his personal email inbox is no longer available. Moreover, other youth directors could not find any other emails that relate to the data subject, in their common email inbox. According to the data subject, this was negligence on the side of the controller. Hence, she brought the issue before Court. The Court rejected the claim. The Court stated that the data subject did not make a plausible claim that the city government did not fully comply with the access request. In this regard, the Court considered that the city government had already conducted a new search in 2020, which led them to provide more documents on 15 December 2020. According to the Court, it was not implausible that there are no more emails to provide to the data subject. Moreover, the Court stipulated that it is not relevant that the personal inbox of the former youth director may have contained personal data relating to the data subject’s children. After all, the Court stipulated that the controller provided all information that is required under Article 15 GDPR.