The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU)1 has ruled that police authorities may not retain, in a generic and undifferentiated manner and until their death, biometric and genetic data of persons who have been the subject of a final criminal conviction for the commission of a criminal offense, for reasons of prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offenses or for the enforcement of criminal penalties, such generic and undifferentiated retention being contrary to European Union law.
The case
In Bulgaria, a person was entered in the police register as part of an investigation into false testimony and was eventually found guilty of this offense and sentenced to a one-year suspended sentence.
After serving this sentence, he was rehabilitated and asked for his data to be deleted from the police register.
This request was rejected because, according to Bulgarian law, data is kept and can be processed by the authorities until the death of the data subject.
When asked to rule on the matter, the Bulgarian Supreme Administrative Court asked the CJEU whether Bulgarian law was in line with EU law.
Judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union
The CJEU responded by stating that police authorities may not store, in a generic and undifferentiated manner and until their death, biometric and genetic data of persons who have been the subject of a final criminal conviction for the commission of a criminal offense, for the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offenses or for the execution of criminal penalties, such generic and undifferentiated storage being contrary to European Union law.
According to the CJEU, in such circumstances, the national authorities are obliged to impose on the data controller the obligation to periodically assess whether such storage is still necessary and to recognize the data subject’s right to the erasure of such data when that necessity no longer exists.
Union law establishes a general framework aimed at ensuring that the retention of personal data and the period of such retention are limited to what is necessary for such retention, leaving it to the Member States to determine, in compliance with this framework, the concrete situations in which the protection of the fundamental rights of the data subject requires the erasure of such data and the moment at which this must occur.
In the case of Bulgaria, the personal data kept in the police register for operational investigation and comparison with other data collected in investigations into other offenses including fingerprints, a photograph, and DNA profiling. The register also contains data on the criminal offenses committed by the person concerned and the convictions handed down in this regard, which may be indispensable for verifying whether the person is involved in criminal offenses other than the one for which they have been definitively convicted and, as such, be considered, in principle, adequate and relevant about the purposes for which they are processed.
However, not all people present the same degree of risk of being involved in other criminal offenses that would justify the application of a uniform retention period for data relating to them. Factors such as the nature and seriousness of the offense committed or the lack of recidivism may mean that the risk posed by the convicted person does not necessarily justify keeping their data in the police record until their death. In such cases, there is no longer a necessary link between the data kept and the objective pursued. Therefore, this time limit will only be appropriate in special circumstances that justify it, which is not the case when it’s applied in a generic and undifferentiated manner to any person definitively convicted of committing an intentional offense.
In this regard, the CJEU concluded that EU law precludes national legislation, such as that of Bulgaria, which provides for the retention by the police authorities, for the purposes of the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences or the execution of criminal penalties, of personal data, in particular biometric and genetic data, relating to persons who have been the subject of a final criminal conviction for an intentional criminal offence covered by public prosecutions, until their death, including in the event of rehabilitation, without imposing an obligation on the controller to periodically assess whether such storage is still necessary, or recognising the right of that person to the erasure of such data when their storage is no longer necessary for the purposes for which they are processed, or, where appropriate, to the restriction of their processing.
Buying and Selling Property – What’s changing with Simplex?
Over the years, excessive bureaucratisation has become one of the most controversial features of the development of economic activities in Portugal. It has even been criticised by the European Union, given that this excessive bureaucratisation is damaging the country’s competitiveness and the attractiveness of national and foreign investment.
Buying, building and selling a property in Portugal was then a veritable bureaucratic labyrinth, full of endless requests for documents and unintelligible procedures.
So Portugal, in its never-ending quest for investment, included the Urban Simplex in the famous Recovery and Resilience Plan and under the controversial “More Housing” Programme, simplifying procedures in the area of urban and land planning and increasing the fluidity of the domestic and foreign property market.
What changes in practice?
With the phased entry into force of the new law (Decree-Law no. 10/2024, of 08 January), since 01 January 2024, the formalities related to the purchase and sale of real estate have been simplified, among other things, by eliminating the need to show or prove the existence of the technical data sheet of the dwelling and the use authorisation or the need to prove that they are not required.
In other words, when you sell a property, you won’t need to prove that the technical data sheet and the use authorisation exist, nor will you need to present them. As a general rule, all you need to present is the land registry certificate, the land booklet and the energy certificate, documents that you can obtain without going to public services and thus save time and money.
In addition to this change, the legislator has also eliminated some bureaucratic barriers to property construction, namely:
- The need to obtain urban planning licences or make prior communications, identifying new cases of exemption or dispensation from prior control by the municipalities;
- The need to obtain certain licences, creating new cases in which only prior communication is required;
- The building licence, which has been replaced by the receipt for payment of the fees due;
- The authorisation for use when the work has been subject to prior control, replacing this authorisation with the mere submission of documents relating to the project;
- Adopted the tacit approval regime for building licences.
In short, acts relating to real estate have been debureaucratised and made more transparent and accessible. It is now effectively easier to flow through the property market in Portugal. It remains to be seen whether, at the end of the day, this will result in more affordable homes for Portuguese residents or an increase in property purchases by foreign funds for real estate speculation.
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