In its decision No. 69 of 24 April 2024, the Constitutional Court declared illegitimate Article 3 of Puglia Region Law No. 13 of 2023 on the installation of video-surveillance systems, for violation of the obligations deriving from Italy’s membership of the European Union and for invasion of the State’s exclusive legislative competences in the field of “civil order”.
By notification of 17 August 2023, the President of the Council of Ministers brought an action for the constitutional legitimacy of Article 3 of the law of the Region of Puglia No. 13 of 15 June 2023 on the prevention and combating of mistreatment or abuse to the detriment of the elderly and people with disabilities.
In particular, according to the applicant, Article 3 regulates the installation of video surveillance systems in residential and care facilities by referring only in a general way to the rules on the protection of personal data contained in European Regulation No. 679/2016 (GDPR) and in the Italian Code on the subject (Legislative Decree 196/2003 as amended by Legislative Decree 101/2018) and introducing further specific provisions “the implicit effect of which would be to derogate from the overall regulation of the matter provided by the competent state legislature”.
First of all, the aforementioned Article 3 constitutes a violation of Article 117, c.2, lett. l) of the Constitution as it is a regional regulation on the protection of personal data, a matter which the Constitutional Court itself has already ascribed, in past judgments, to the exclusive legislative competence of the State, falling under the matter “civil order”.
In this regard, the Court states that, contrary to what is claimed by the defence of the Puglia Region, the rules contained in the law under consideration cannot be attributed to the exercise of concurrent regional legislative competence in the matter of “protection of health”, which is in no way relevant to Article 3. In fact, that concurrent competence may, at most, allow the Region to impose a charge relating to the installation of a video surveillance system by invoking the obligation to comply with all European and State legislation in the field of video surveillance and the processing of personal data.
Secondly, Article 117(1) of the Constitution is violated, since the subject of the processing of personal data is mainly regulated by European Union sources, in the exercise of the competence established in Article 16 of the TFEU, which is then completed and supplemented by national sources.
Specifically, the provisions contained in Article 3 result in a violation of the principle of proportionality, since video surveillance represents a particularly invasive monitoring tool that the law under review does not prove to be the most appropriate one to introduce in this specific case.
In addition, the article under consideration merely requires the consent of the guests (or guardians), without specifying the methods and the character in which consent must be given, and there is a total lack of regulation of the retention period of video footage.
Moreover, Article 3 totally disregards the protection of workers under Law No. 300/1970 regulating the conditions of admissibility of remote control of workers in the workplace. In conclusion, the Constitutional Court has established that the Region cannot intervene in an area reserved to the State by autonomously regulating the matter of “protection of personal data”, since in this way it overlaps with European and State legislation, exceeding its own competences, especially considering the complexity and the breadth of the profiles involved in the processing of personal data, which require delicate balancing between rights that are often inviolable. Consequently, the Court declared Article 3 of the aforementioned law of the Puglia Region unconstitutional.
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