The Romanian DPA releases 2019-2023 overview of relevant judicial practice developments

3.05.2023

On 2 May 2023, the Romanian DPA published a synthetic presentation of the 2019-2023 judicial proceedings in which the DPA is involved.

In a nutshell, this overview covers 127 court cases initiated between 2019 and 2022, broken down into the following key numbers:

  • out of the 127 court cases, 49 concern challenges against the sanctions imposed by the Romanian DPA;
    • out of the latter 49 court cases, 23 had been finalized by 31 March 2023;
      • 18 of the finalized cases were concluded with final judgments favorable to the Romanian DPA;
        • 11 of the cases finalized favorable to the Romanian DPA were concluded with final judgments upholding in full the fines imposed (i.e., amounts ranging from EUR 100,000 to EUR 1,000);
        • 5 of the cases finalized favorable to the Romanian DPA were concluded with final judgments reducing the amount of the imposed fines or replacing the fine with a warning;
      • 5 of the finalized cases were concluded with final judgments favorable to the controllers challenging the sanctions imposed by the Romanian DPA;
    • some of these challenges were against the Romanian DPA’s decisions ordering the cessation of the processing and the deletion of personal data;
      • some final judgments delivered in 2022 and 2023 upheld the Romanian DPA’s decisions ordering the cessation of the processing and the deletion of the images collected by the local police, following checks which found the respective data processing unlawful;
  • 42 court cases initiated in 2022, out of which 22 concern challenges against the sanctions imposed by the Romanian DPA;
  • in one of these cases, the Bucharest Court of Appeal decided to refer several questions to the CJEU for a preliminary ruling, thus suspending the national judicial proceedings. This request for a preliminary ruling does not appear to be registered yet in the CJEU publicly available database.

The press release is available here (only in Romanian).

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