Court case 25/04270 – Court Ruling (France, 2025)

A professional notaries’ association (the controller) hired an accounting inspector (the data subject) in 2024. A year later, the controller dismissed the data subject for reasons related to his performance at work. Following his dismissal, the data subject requested the disclosure of his personal data including his work emails and other files. A month later, he filed an application with the Paris Labour Court seeking an order requiring the controller to provide him with the documents. The Paris Labour Court found that there were no grounds for the request. The data subject appealed the decision and argued in favour of obtaining access to his personal data in accordance with Article 15 GDPR. The data subject further claimed that the requested documents would enable him to respond to the decision of his dismissal. The Paris Court of Appeal held that the purpose of Article 15 GDPR is not to obtain copies of professional email correspondence of an employee in the course of his work, of which he is aware and which contains only his identity. Instead, the court noted that the purpose of the article is to enable the data subject to check that processing complies with the law, to check the accuracy of the data and, if needed, to ask for the rectification or erasure of the data. Furthermore, the Court noted that the controller sent the data subject a copy of his entire personnel file. Moreover, analysing the request from the perspective of Article 145 of the Code of Civil Procedure, it concluded that the requested documents would not serve the data subject in appealing his dismissal. Therefore, the Court rejected the data subject’s appeal.