On January 22, 2019, the French Football Federation announced that it had fined soccer club Paris Saint-Germain one hundred thousand euros for ethnic profiling of youth players, NRC reported.
The soccer club recorded the ethnicity of youth soccer players during scouting between 2013 and 2018. Scouts reportedly entered the ethnicity of youth players on assessment forms, distinguishing between 'French,' 'Maghrebine' (North African), 'Antillean' and 'Black African.' The goal was reportedly to achieve a "balance in the mix" of the selection. The club has promised to reorganize the selection process.
Even in the Netherlands, the processing of personal data revealing a person's racial or ethnic origin is in principle prohibited.
Personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin qualify as special personal data under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Stricter rules apply to the processing of special personal data than for "ordinary" personal data. The basic principle is that special personal data may not be processed unless a specific exception applies.
One of the exceptions that legitimizes the processing of special personal data, including data on a person's race or ethnicity, is the explicit consent of a data subject (the person whose personal data is involved). In this regard, it is required that the data subject be clearly informed what (for what purposes) he/she is consenting, that the data subject should be free to grant his/her consent (or not), and that the consent be unambiguous (granted through an active act, i.e. no tacit consent, pre-ticked boxes or opt-outs). In addition, the data subject must be given the opportunity to withdraw his/her consent at any time (which should be as easy as giving consent). Moreover, it must be possible to prove (in retrospect) that legally valid consent was obtained.
In addition, the AVG contains a specific exception for the processing of personal data revealing a person's race or ethnicity for reasons of substantial public interest, which exception for the Netherlands has been further elaborated in the Implementation Act of the AVG (UAVG). Under this exception, it is permitted to process data about someone's race or ethnicity for identification purposes, insofar as the processing is unavoidable for that purpose. This could be the case, for example, of an employee's passport photo on an access pass.
In addition, the UAVG provides an exception to the prohibition on processing personal data revealing a person's race or ethnicity in the context of a preferential policy toward certain minority groups. Under this exception, it is permitted (under certain additional conditions) to process data about a person's race or ethnicity for the purpose of granting a privileged position to persons of a particular ethnic or cultural minority group, in order to eliminate or reduce factual disadvantages related to race or ethnicity. This includes, for example, the processing by schools of data for the purpose of obtaining additional financial resources to make up educational disadvantages of immigrant students, among others.
In the Netherlands, the municipality of Rotterdam was reprimanded by the court in 2012 for registering the ethnicity of "at-risk youth" in a database. When regular assistance for young people did not work, their ethnicity was recorded in a database. Based on this, the municipality could decide to pair a social worker of the same background with a young person. The purpose of this was to reduce/eliminate the disadvantage of the youth in question. In brief, the court ruled that it was not necessary to record ethnicity for the realization of the preference policy and that the municipality might have been able to achieve the same goal with less (for the privacy of the young people) onerous measures.
This article can also be found in the AVG file.
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