Österreichischer Rundfunk – CJEU Judgment (Austria, 2003)

Some Austrian public authorities and undertakings refused to provide a State control body with access to personal data concerning salaries and incomes of their employees. In doing so, they violated Austrian law. The Austrian Constitutional Court, however, suspected that such a national law may have been in violation of Directive 95/46/EC. In particular, the provision on which disclosure of employees’ data was based seemed in conflict with Articles 6(1)(b) and (c), namely purpose limitation and data minimization. In the opinion of the Austrian Constitutional Court, legal bases under Articles 7(c) and (e) of the Directive – i.e. legal obligation and public interest – should be read in light of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which protects privacy and family life. Therefore, the Austrian Constitutional Court referred the matter to the Court of Justice. The CJEU had to answer the question whether Directive 95/46/EC precluded the adoption of national law authorizing a State control body to collect and communicate, for the purpose of publication, data on the income of people employed by public bodies. The CJEU stated that processing of personal data should take place only in compliance with data protection principles and on grounds of a valid legal basis. Moreover, being privacy a fundamental right protected by the ECHR, interference with it should respect Article 8 of the Convention. To ascertain whether processing was compliant with the Convention, the CJEU performed a four-steps test commonly used by the European Court of Human Rights. It ascertained: # the existence of an interference with privacy in the facts at issue; # that interference was in accordance with Austrian law; # that the measure had a legitimate aim, namely to put pressure on public bodies so that they kept employees’ salaries within reasonable limits and did not burden State’s finances; # that proportionality was respected. In principle, taxpayers in a democratic soci