This is the first time that the Council of State has had to rule on the application of the GDPR. And he agreed with the Catholic Church regarding the conservation and especially the deletion of personal data.
After a similar judgment to this effect by the Court of Cassation in 2014, the Council of State, in turn, ruled in favor of the Catholic Church last Friday. The latter will therefore be able to continue to retain individuals’ personal data, even if they explicitly request their deletion. This decision, which is a first in Europe since the adoption of the GDPR, could one day be reversed.
The Church, not affected by the GDPR
The decision of the Council of State places the will of the Catholic Church above that of citizens who want it to forget them: “The interest attached, for the Catholic Church, to the conservation of personal data relating to baptism (…), must be regarded as a legitimate, compelling reason, prevailing over the moral interest of the applicant”. The argument of the religious institution is that this sacrament cannot be given “only once in a person’s life, a requirement which could be prevented by the permanent erasure of the recording”.
Above all, the Council of State explains that this data is always kept physically, in registers. They are therefore only accessible to interested parties and people working directly for the diocese, and in no way to third parties and are also kept “in a closed place ».
If it is the Council of State which ruled on this question, it is because it was contacted directly by a person who contested that the CNIL had not followed up on his request to be deleted from the Angers baptism registers.
A first judgment in this sense in 2014
Already in 2014, before the adoption of the GDPR, a man saw his complaint reach the Court of Cassation. The latter ultimately issued a similar decision explaining that “from the day of its administration and despite its denial, baptism constituted a fact whose historical reality could not be contested”.
It remains that if the French Council of State has decided in this direction, it is for the moment the first European authority of this type to make such a decision. There is no guarantee that its European counterparts will have the same interpretation of this text. And if it is the European Court of Justice which issues a divergent decision, it will have the last word.
Source : Le Figaro, Legifrance
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