Data Protection Under Review of Constitutional Court: Administrative Databases Directly Accessible to Public Authorities

Abstract The development and use of administrative databases accelerate administrative and sometimes even criminal proceedings within public authorities. However, the increased data storage and free circulation of data pose a challenge to the protection of personal data and, thus, to the privacy of individuals. The focus of this article is the constitutional control of legislation that mandates the storage and processing of personal data—the review of legislative acts themselves, not their application. This article first presents two leading cases of the Constitutional Court of Latvia; second, it analyses the scope of the review and the constitutional articles protecting personal data in state-held databases; and third, the article analyses the legal problems that led to the annulment of the relevant national provisions. Finally, the author generalises on the lessons of the two judgments and similar judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights for future administrative databases directly accessible to public authorities and discusses the particular considerations that any legislator must take into account when mandating the storage of certain types of personal data in administrative databases.