Ten years ago, at the beginning of the sovereignty process and with Jorge Fernández Díaz as Minister of the Interior, a national newspaper published the face, name, surname and ID of several judges. “The conspiracy of 33 sovereignist judges” was the headline in relation to a manifesto signed by the right to decide in Catalonia.
The Data Protection Agency (APD) investigated the leak, but archived the file. After a judicial ordeal, and after a decade, the Supreme Court orders the agency to reopen the procedure and carry out new “useful and effective” procedures to clarify the facts, including the preparation of the police report in which the data was collected. personal of these judges.
The magistrates who were the protagonists of that press article denounced the events and maintained that the published photographs came from a file of the Ministry of the Interior, as they coincided with those used to create the DNI, and therefore the data protection law had been violated.
The National Court then ordered the APD to initiate new actions directed at the general direction of the Police. However, the agency concluded that security measures had been correctly applied in the processing of DNI data and closed the file again.
The appellants continued to fight and went to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which in 2022 issued a ruling in which it indicated that there is no internal legal provision that justifies the preparation by the police of a report on the citizens when there is no evidence of the commission of a crime or of their involvement in the previous phases necessary to commit it.
Having analyzed the case, the Supreme Court has considered that the APD did not analyze the reason for the existence of an internal Police report-note. The document contained the personal data of the appellants, judges and magistrates in office, which included the date of birth, address, judicial assignment, membership in a judicial association and, in some cases, reference was made to their participation. in certain activities or social movements and even their political opinions.
