The European Court of Human Rights condemns Spain for leaking data of Catalan judges to the newspaper La Razón because of the consultation of 9 November

The European Court of Human Rights condemns Spain for having violated the right to privacy and family life of the plaintiffs. In 2014, in the context of the 9 November consultation, 33 Catalan judges signed a manifesto in favour of Catalonia’s right to decide. In response to this, La Razón published an article entitled ‘The conspiracy of the thirty-three sovereignist judges,’ which included personal data of these judges (names and surnames, photographs, courts where they worked and comments on their political views), obtained from the police ID database. 20 of the 33 judges appealed to the ECHR. The ECHR considers that the existence of reports with said data violates their rights since there was no legal provision that authorised obtaining these reports in connection with any crime. Secondly, the ECHR argues that the photos and information were indeed taken from police databases and that Spain did not carry out certain investigative measures to remedy this violation of privacy. On the same day, the judges ask the Spanish Data Protection Agency to reopen their case.