Court case 324 O 278/23 – Court Ruling (Germany, 2025)

In 2022 the Berlin Administrative Court issued a ruling. The ruling included statements about the plaintiff (the data subject). In particular, the ruling stated that they were in arrears with the payment for their pension plan and that they received unemployment benefits for a while. Non-profit legal database OpenJur (the controller) provided a free digital legal database. In the context of this activity, the controller published the ruling of the Administrative Court in its database. The controller did not remove the data subject's name from the ruling before publishing. The data subject found the ruling on the database and requested the controller to remove it. The controller anonymized the ruling by removing the data subject's name but refused to remove the ruling. The data subject filed a lawsuit with the Regional Court of Hamburg. They claimed for damages and sought an injunction for the controller to remove the ruling from the database. First, the Court clarified that the controller's activities were journalistic in nature and, therefore, fell within the scope of Art. 85(2) GDPR (national exemptions for journalistic activities) and the relative German laws[1]. In this regard, the Court noted that the controller did not simply publish rulings. On the contrary, the controller carried out an editorial activity by choosing the decisions to publish, requesting unpublished decisions from courts, and providing summaries for the decisions. Then, the Court clarified that the controller's activities were lawful under national law. In particular, the Court noted that the Berlin Administrative Court was a "privileged source" of information. The Hamburg Court held that in relying on such a source, the defendant acted justifiably and was under no obligation to conduct subsequent research[2]. For these reasons, the Court dismissed both the damage claim and the request for injunctive relief.