BackActing on a petition by the Human Rights Ombudsman of the Republic of Slovenia, the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Slovenia has annulled legislation which allowed police to use systems for automatic license plate recognition (ANPR). The said legislation, such as it was, contravened the constitutional right to protection of personal data. The now-annulled provisions were introduced into the Police Tasks And Powers Act in February 2017 and the Ombudsman filed the said constitutional challenge of legislation in question later that same year.
According to the Slovenian Constitution, the collection, processing, designated use, supervision and protection of the confidentiality of personal data shall be provided by law. The Constitutional Court held that the provisions in question did not meet this requirement. Each data processing step requires to be specified by law individually – and since automatic license plate checks involve data collection and their checking against other personal data bases, while the challenged provisions did not specify that the collected license plate data is to be processed by means of automatic checking against other databases, there could be no compatibility with the constitution.
Source: The Human Rights Ombudsman of the Republic of Slovenia
