Court case C/16/526196/ HA RK / 21-01 – Court Ruling (Netherlands, 2022)

The applicant’s marriage to Ms D was converted into a registered partnership, after which the applicant and Ms D entered into a covenant for the termination of the registered partnership and a partial dissolution of the matrimonial community of property. The community of property was successfully dissolved in 2004. In the abovementioned covenant, the applicant and Ms D had agreed to continue their joined ownership of the life insurance policy. In particular, there was first an obligation to share the value with each other upon payment and second Ms D had the obligation to reimburse the applicant annually for the subscription of the insurance. A dispute arose in relation to ASR’s compliance with the GDPR obligations. Hence, the applicant will be referred to as the data subject and ASR will be referred to as data controller. In particular, the data controller informed the data subject of the personal data kept on him by the data controller. However, the data subject believed that this information was inaccurate and incomplete. Therefore, the data subject initiated several procedures against the data controller. The first four requests concern the right to inspection. Precisely, a request for full access of the data subject’s data kept by the data controller, based on article 15 GDPR. Moreover, a request for an overview of the contacts the data controller had with third parties, as well as a list of documents added to the data subject’s file on request of third parties. Finally, the data subject requested a copy of the complete file of his documents from either 2004 or 2016 onwards. With his final three requests, the data subject asked the court to order the data controller to handle the agreement with the data subject in accordance with the GDPR, to delete all personal data of the data subject after proper termination of the agreement and to order a payment of the material and immaterial damages suffered by the improper implementation of the GDPR. First, the Cour