Here we collect all relevant national and international court decisions. We will upload decisions to the database continuously. Our estimate is that by the end of 2021, there will be some important case law regarding COVID-19 contact-tracing and quarantine-enforcing applications.

Last updated 15 March 2021

National courts

Bulgaria

Name of Applicants: A. Katchaounova v. Ministry of Health (31 May 2021)

The Administrative Court of Sofia City decided on the merits of the case and obliged the Ministry of Health to review its decision not to provide the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee (BHC) with the Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) about the Bulgarian Covid tracing app ViruSafe. While the court proceedings were pending, the Ministry of Health provided the court with the DPIA, but it was not made available to the BHC. The court accepted that the DPIA either cited generally known provisions or copied provisions from the GDPR with few exceptions (namely art. 7.2 – the risk assessment evaluation, art. 8 – technical and organizational measures for meeting personal data risks, art. 9 – the adequate measures undertaken by the administrators for risk minimization and art. 10 – risk assessment for the measures undertaken after the previous provisions. The Ministry of Health reviewed its decisions and provided the BHC with the DPIA. More information

Israel

Supreme Court Bans Mobile Phone Tracking (1 March 2021)

Name of applicant: The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI), and Privacy Israel

Summary: Israel’s Supreme Court banned the government from using its mobile phone tracking of persons diagnosed with COVID-19. The country's counter-terrorism agency, Shin Bet, used the surveillance technology to match carriers of the virus locations against other mobile phones nearby to determine with whom they came into contact. In its ruling, the court said it feared the digital tracking, imposed as a temporary emergency measure, was slowly becoming permanent. It gave the government until 14 March to end the indiscriminate use of the surveillance and limit it to confirmed coronavirus carriers who refuse epidemiological questioning. The Shin Bet phon-tracing technology was previously known mostly as a means to track down wanted Palestinian militants. Read more