Smaranda Bara and Others – CJEU Judgment (European Union, 2015)

Article 315 (currently 322) of Romanian Law No 95/2006 mandated that all public authorities must transmit any data necessary to determine the insurance status of individuals to the National Health Insurance Fund (CNAS). The law also recognised persons without a taxable income qualify as insured. The National Tax Administration Agency (ANAF) transmitted data related to several self-employed persons, the applicants, including their income, based on a common 2007 Protocol, not subject to official publication. Neither authority informed the data subjects of this transmission. In this preliminary ruling, the Court clarified, first, that Article 124 TFEU (prohibiting privileged access by public authorities to financial institutions) is exclusively related to the Union’s economic and monetary policy, irrelevant to the proceedings and thus rejected as inadmissible. Second, since the fourth question concerned the lawfulness of data processing in a specific context, it benefited from a presumption of relevance to the dispute at hand. As a result, it was deemed admissible. Then the Court held that the Directive 95/46 was applicable. First, because the data transferred (names, categories of income, taxes paid) constitutes personal data. Second, both the transfer of data from ANAF to CNAS and the subsequent processing performed by CNAS constitute data processing. Therefore, the rules set out in Articles 10 and 11 (information that must be communicated to the data subject) are also applicable to the processing in dispute, in the limits set in Article 13. With regards to substance, the Court stated, first, that Article 10 sets out what information must be provided to the data subjects if their data was collected directly from them. This includes providing the identity of the “recipients of data” (Article 10(c)) in order to ensure fair processing. Thus, the Court and the Advocate General agreed that the principle of fair processing “requires a public administrative body to inform