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”, it was titled in relation to a manifesto signed by the right to decide in Catalonia. The Data Protection Agency (APD) investigated the leak, but filed the file. After a judicial trial, and after a decade, the Supreme Court orders the agency to reopen the procedure and carry out new “useful and effective” proceedings to clarify the facts, including the preparation of the police report in that the personal data of these judges was collected.
The magistrates who starred in that press article decided to denounce the facts and stated that the photographs published came from a file of the Ministry of the Interior, since they coincided with those used for the preparation of the DNI, and therefore ‘had violated the data protection law.
The National Court then ordered the Data Protection Agency to initiate new actions directed at the general direction of the Police. However, the body concluded that the security measures had been correctly applied in the processing of the DNI data and closed the file again.
The appellants continued to put up a face and turned to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), which in 2022 issued a judgment in which it was noted that there was no internal legal provision that justified the preparation by the police of a report on citizens when there were no indications of the commission of a crime or their involvement in the previous stages necessary to commit it.
After analyzing the case, the Supreme Court considered that the Data Protection Agency did not analyze the reason for the existence of an internal report-note of the police in which the personal data of the appellants, judges and magistrates appeared in practice, such as date of birth, domicile, judicial destination, membership of judicial association and, in some cases, reference was made to their participation in certain activities or social movements, and even to their opinions policies
