Stockholm: A Swedish website that sells access to people’s criminal convictions cannot escape EU data protection law by calling itself journalism, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled on 9 July.

The case concerned Lexbase, a fee-based portal run by Legal Newsdesk Sweden that lets anyone look up an individual and read their criminal record for a payment. A man identified only as ND, who had been convicted of an offence, asked the operator to erase the entry. The company deleted it only much later, and then on the basis of its own storage policy rather than in answer to his request.

Sweden had leaned on a broad national exemption that shields activity carried out for journalistic purposes from most of the General Data Protection Regulation. The Court of Justice pushed back, ruling that a service which simply makes convictions available to anyone willing to pay does not, in principle, count as journalism.

The judges set out what genuine journalistic processing looks like. It requires some editorial handling before publication, a recognised code of ethics or an identifiable editorial line, and factual claims checked before they go out. A database that publishes raw court data without any of that fails the test and stays bound by the GDPR’s safeguards.

The ruling anchors data protection firmly in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, whose Articles 7 and 8 guarantee respect for private life and the protection of personal data. National lawmakers, the Court stressed, cannot stretch the journalism carve-out so wide that it hollows out those guarantees.

For ND, the decision revives a damages claim worth around 300,000 Swedish kronor that Swedish courts had earlier set aside. His case now returns to the national bench, which must apply the Luxembourg reasoning and decide whether the operator owes compensation.

The wider effect reaches every commercial operator that trades in sensitive personal information. Data on criminal convictions enjoys extra protection under EU law, and the judgment warns that dressing a paid look-up service in the language of the press will not lift that shield. Privacy lawyers expect the reasoning to shape future disputes over background-check firms and people-search sites across the bloc.

The full judgment in Case C-199/24 is available through the Court of Justice case registry. It lands as the Commission weighs its own update to data-retention rules, and it hands regulators a sharper line between public-interest reporting and the commercial resale of people’s pasts.