First judicial application of Schrems II in France
France’s highest administrative court (Conseil d’État) issued a summary judgment that rejected a request for the suspension of France’s centralized health data platform – Health Data Hub (HDH) – on October 13th, 2020. The Conseil d’État further recognized that there is a risk of U.S. intelligence services requesting the data and called for additional guarantees.
For background, France’s HDH is a data hub supposed to consolidate all health data of people receiving medical care in France in order to facilitate data sharing and promote medical research. The French Government initially chose to partner with Microsoft and its cloud platform Azure. On April 15th, 2020, the HDH signed a contract with Microsoft’s Irish affiliate to host the health data in data centers in the EU. On September 28th, 2020, several associations, unions and individual applicants appealed to the summary proceedings judge of the Conseil d’État, asking for the suspension of the processing of health data related to the COVID-19 pandemic in the HDH. The worry was that the hosting of data by a company which is subject to U.S. laws entails data protection risks due to the potential surveillance done under U.S. national surveillance laws, as has been presented and highlighted in the Schrems II case.
On October 8th, 2020, the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et Libertées (CNIL) submitted comments on the summary proceeding before the Conseil d’État. The CNIL considered that, despite all of the technical measures implemented by Microsoft (including data encryption), Microsoft could still be able to access the data it processes on behalf of the HDH and could be subject, in theory, to requests from U.S. intelligence services under FISA (or even EO 12333) that would require Microsoft to transfer personal data stored and processed in the EU.
Further, the CNIL recognized that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in the Schrems II case only examined the situation where an operator transfers, on its own initiative, personal data to the U.S. However, according to the CNIL, the reasons for the CJEU’s decision also require examining the lawfulness of a situation in which an operator processes personal data in the EU but faces the possibility of having to transfer the data following an administrative or judicial order or request from U.S. intelligence services, which was not clearly stated in the Schrems II ruling. In that case, the CNIL considered that U.S. laws (FISA and EO 12333) also apply to personal data stored outside of the U.S.
In the decision of the Conseil d’État, it agreed with the CNIL that it cannot be totally discounted that U.S. public authorities could request Microsoft and its Irish affiliate to access some of the data held in the HDH. However, the summary proceedings judge did not consider the CJEU’s ruling in the Schrems II case to also require examination of the conditions under which personal data may be processed in the EU by U.S. companies or their affiliates as data processors. EU law does not prohibit subcontracting U.S. companies to process personal data in the EU. In addition, the Conseil d’État considered the violation of the GDPR in this case was purely hypothetical because it presupposes that U.S. authorities are interested in accessing the health data held in the HDH. Further, the summary proceedings judge noted that the health data is pseudonymized before being shared within the HDH, and is then further encrypted by Microsoft.
In the end, the judge highlighted that, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an important public interest in continuing the processing of health data as enabled by the HDH. The conclusion reached by the Conseil d’ètat was that there is no adequate justification for suspending the data processing activities conducted by the HDH, but the judge ordered the HDH to work with Microsoft to further strengthen privacy rights.
