Energie AG – Court Ruling (Germany, 2023)

In this particular case, the controller had made an unlawful entry regarding a debt of the data subject with Schufa - a German credit ranking system. As a result, the credit score value of the data subject was negatively impacted. The data subject received a letter informing him about the registration and requested the controller to remove the wrong registration. He claimed that due to this negative entry, among other damages, his mental health was affected and that he could not enter into a certain energy supply contract. Later, the entry was deleted. The data subject however considered that he suffered damages in the past and filed a complaint with the Regional Court of Magdeburg. He claimed that he suffered material and non material damages of a total amount of €10,000. The controller argued that this action constituted an abuse of rights. The Court recalled that under Article 82 (1) and (2) GDPR, any person who has suffered material or non-material damage as a result of a violation of the GDPR is entitled to compensation for damages from the person responsible for the damage caused by the processing that violates the GDPR. The Court considered the wrong entry as an unlawful processing and noted that the data subject successfully proved that they had suffered non-material damages, including the damages for the data subject's mental health. Consequently, the Court awarded €4,000 of damages to the data subject.