Court case IV ZR 204/23 – Court Ruling (Germany, 2025)

The parties are disputing the validity of insurance premium increases in a private health insurance policy. The data subject holds a health insurance policy with the controller, who made premium adjustments. To the extent still relevant for the appeal, the data subject requested information regarding all premium adjustments made by the controller to the insurance contract between 2014 and 2019. The Regional Court dismissed the action. The Higher Regional Court, dismissing the data subject's further appeal, ordered the controller to provide access by partial judgment. The appeal court held that the access request is justified both with regard to the requested information and the related documents in the form of insurance policies and corresponding supplements; the basis for the claim is Article 15(1) GDPR in conjunction with Article 15(3) GDPR. With the appeal the controller continues to pursue its motion to dismiss the action. The court held, that a right to copies of the information submitted for the purpose of premium adjustment in the form of insurance policies and supplements to the insurance policy, does not follow from Article 15(1) and (3) GDPR. The court confirmed it's conclusion of BGH - IV ZR 177/22, that the supplements to the insurance policy, as a whole, do not constitute personal data of the policyholder. The court had previously held, that while letters from the data subject to the controller are to be classified as personal data in their entirety, since the personal information already consists of the fact that the data subject has made a statement in accordance with the letter, conversely - as is relevant here - letters from the controller to the data subject are personal data only insofar as they contain information about the data subject. Accordingly, only the personal data of an insurance policy is not categorically excluded from the scope of application of Article 15(1) GDPR. However, as the data subject did not limit his asserted claim and