The Constitutional Court of Latvia to rule on storage of past punishment data

In a similar judgement in 2021 regarding the Latvian Road Traffic Law, the Constitutional Court ruled that the Latvian legislation in respect to processing of driver’s data, in particular – penalty points, does not comply with the right to respect for private life. Another somewhat similar case concerning storage of data performed by the state is currently in the Court awaiting hearing, this time regarding the Punishment Register Law. The case was initiated on 1 March 2022 and is to be ruled on by 1 August 2022.

More specifically, the Court was addressed by the Administrative district court that has now suspended proceedings until the Constitutional Court’s decision. The case at hand presents a clash between a few areas of law, seeing as the person on trial was first tried and acquitted of liability within criminal proceedings and then subsequently turned to the Administrative court requesting that the holding of the data stored by the Information Centre of the Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Latvia in the Punishment Register be recognised as unlawful and compensation of non-pecuniary damage be awarded.

The Administrative district court in its application states that, in accordance with the contested norm, the information on the acquitted person is in fact to be kept in the archival database of the Punishment Register for the entire lifetime of the person. Such legal regulation disproportionately restricts the right to respect for private life of a person enshrined in Article 96 of the Constitution of Latvia, as it is not in line with the objectives of the establishment of the Punishment Register and the principles of processing of data of natural persons in the field of criminal law. 

The aforementioned Law currently foresees that the following information shall be stored in the archives database of the Register: ‘’regarding a person whose criminal record has been cleared or removed, against whom the initiated criminal proceedings have been terminated, regarding an acquitted person, regarding a person on whom the imposed compulsory measure of correctional nature has been executed, a person on whom the imposed compulsory measure of medical nature has been revoked – for one year after information has been received from the Population Register regarding the person's death, however no longer than 100 years after the person's birth’’. Thus, the information is to be stored in the archives of the Register for as long as the person lives, even where the person is fully acquitted of criminal liability.

While the case presents many new layers to the issue of publicly available and state stored data, it somewhat resembles the aforementioned recent case before the same court where the information relating to penalty points imposed on drivers was accessible to the public and disclosed by the Road Safety Directorate to any person who requested it, without the person having to establish a specific interest in obtaining that information, including to private operators, e.g. data bases, for re-use (read here: The Constitutional Court of Latvia rules that the Latvian legislation in respect to processing of driver’s data, in particular – penalty points, does not comply with the right to respect for private life). 

In this case, after consulting with the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Constitutional Court ruled that the regulation was unlawful, obliging the legislator to make amendments to the Road Traffic Law. This new judgement, set to be prepared before the end of the year, will likely take another step towards alignment of national and EU legal framework in the GDPR field.