b) Article 38(3) second sentence of the Bavarian Police Act in the version of 22 July 2014 and its amended version in Article 39(3) second
sentence in the version of 18 May 2018 are incompatible with Article
2(1) in conjunction with Article 1(1) of the Basic Law to the extent that
they fail to limit the use of number plate data for further purposes to
the protection of legal interests of at least considerable weight or comparably weighty public interests.
3. The provisions stipulated under 2. shall continue to apply in their
version of 18 May 2018 in accordance with the reasons provided until
the legislature has enacted new provisions, or until 31 December 2019
at the latest.
4. The Judgments of the Federal Administrative Court (Bundesverwaltungsgericht) of 22 October 2014 – BVerwG 6 C 7.13 –, of the Bavarian
Higher Administrative Court (Bayerischer Verwaltungsgerichtshof) of
17 December 2012 – 10 BV 09.2641 – and the Bavarian Administrative
Court (Munich) (Bayerisches Verwaltungsgericht München) of 23 September 2009 – M 7 K 08.3052 – violate the complainant’s right under
Article 2(1) in conjunction with Article 1(1) of the Basic Law (Grundgesetz – GG). The judgment of the Federal Administrative Court is reversed and the matter is remanded to the Federal Administrative
Court.
5. For the rest, the constitutional complaint is rejected.
6. The Federal Republic of Germany and the Free State of Bavaria
must each reimburse the complainant one-half of his necessary expenses.
Reasons:
A.
With his constitutional complaint, the complainant challenges administrative court
decisions rejecting his application seeking that the Free State of Bavaria shall refrain
from using automatic number plate recognition pursuant to Bavarian police law. Indirectly, the constitutional complaint challenges the statutory provisions governing automatic number plate recognition.
[Excerpt from Press Release no. 8/2019 of 5 February 2019]
Bavarian police are authorised to use automatic number plate recognition. In this
regard, the number plates of passing vehicles are covertly and automatically recorded by means of number plate reading devices; the recorded data is temporarily stored
together with information on location, date, time and direction of travel, and crosschecked against number plate information in police database records (Fahndungsbestand). To this end, a separate database is set up which, in the practice of Bavarian
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