Land Hessen – CJEU Judgment (Germany, 2010)

In 2005, Council Regulation 1290/05 created two agricultural funds, namely: the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund (EAGF) and the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD). This Regulation required that the names of the beneficiaries of the funds, their place of establishment/residence, the postal code of this place and the annual amounts received by each of them were published on the Bundesanstalt’s website. The site was provided with a search tool. An agricultural undertaking, in the legal form of a partnership, and a full-time farmer applied to receive funds. Both of them asked the Wiesbaden Administrative Court to order the the competent local authority, Land Hessen (the controller), to refrain from, or to be prohibited from, transmitting or publishing those data for the purposes of the general publication of information on the financial amounts granted. The controller maintained that the obligation to publish arose from the legal text of Regulations n. 1290/2005 and n. 259/2008 (rules for the publication of information on the beneficiaries of the funds), but undertook not to publish amounts received by beneficiaries until a final decision was rendered. In turn, the Administrative Court believed that the obligation to publish constituted an unjustified interference with the fundamental right to the protection of personal data. It considered that this obligation did not improve the prevention of irregularities, since extensive control mechanisms for that purpose were already in place. In those circumstances, the Administrative Court referred to the CJEU for preliminary rulings on the validity os such provisions. The CJEU recalled that, since the right to data protection is not absolute, it can be limited when the requirements set out in Article 52(1) of the Charter are met. In the case at hand, it acknowledged that such interference with Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter was provided for by law and met an objective of general interest, namely,