Court case 2 A 124/22 – Court Ruling (Germany, 2022)

The data subject is a public employee of a state authority and involved in family law proceedings. In the course of the proceedings, she filed a lawsuit to seek a declaration that four judges, which were involved in the proceedings, violated her right to data protection by disclosing data from the family law dispute to her public employer without authorisation and requested that they cease and desist from violating her right to data protection in the future. The defendants pointed out that during her family law proceedings, the data subject developed a history of filing numerous and extremely detailed regular disciplinary complaints against judges responsible for her law suits, succeeding more than 100 complaints a year. Furthermore, the data subject shared many of her correspondence with the court with her employer by placing their email address in the "cc" in an email and it was found that fax submissions by the plaintiff had shown the area code assigned to the data subject's state authority. Due to the excessive amounts of complaints, the judges have been given reasons to believe that she may not be able to properly represent herself in front of the court in her family law disputes or commit to her public employment. To ensure an exhaustive evaluation of the situation, some judges who were ruling in the family disputes got into contact with her employer and disclosed personal data concerning the family law proceedings. The first instance court held that the data processing is legal pursuant to Article 6(1)(c) GDPR and Article 6(1)(e) GDPR. The GDPR does not provide any specific regulation regarding employment data protection law other than Article 88 GDPR, which allows employment data to be regulated by the member states. Due to her employment at a public office, the data processing was lawful upon § 22 Nr. 1 SaarlDSG, which regulates that data processing is allowed when the data processor is a public office and the processing is needed for the beginning or termination of employment. Additionally, in a balancing of interests, the interest of the employer to have trustworthy employees would overweight the right to protection of her personal data. The court dismissed the appeal. It noted that requirement to present the case in the appeal admissions procedure pursuant to German procedural law requires that the respective applicant substantially examines the content of the challenged decision of the administrative court and its the supporting reasons. This substantiated discussion requires appropriate preparation by the applicant. On the other hand, it is not the task of the Higher Administrative Court to determine, from a mixture of statements in the form of a statement of grounds for appeal, which aspect of the argument could be assigned to which ground for admissibility.