Advocate General Laila Medina of the Court of Justice of the European Union on 1 October 2026 proposed that a person baptised as a child may, in principle, require a church to delete his or her personal details from a baptismal register unless the church demonstrates compelling legitimate grounds to keep them. In Case C-12/25, Bisdom Gent VZW v Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit, the opinion also holds that striking a name through while leaving it legible does not amount to erasure.

In Short

A Belgian man who was baptised as a child asked his local Catholic diocese to remove him from its church records, and one of the advocates general of the EU's top court has now said that privacy law can, in principle, back him. It matters because the same privacy rules cover churches, charities and companies alike, and the opinion sets out when an organisation has to stop holding someone's details and what counts as really deleting them. The adviser's view does not bind the judges, who have only just begun deliberating, so nothing changes yet and the final answer will come in a later ruling.

What the opinion proposes

The opinion, published as a provisional text, answers five questions referred by the hof van beroep te Brussel, the Court of Appeal in Brussels. It runs to 212 numbered points and 160 footnotes, and it opens with the line from Matthew 22:21 about rendering unto Caesar and unto God. Its closing position is more specific. According to the opinion, neither religious communities nor their current or former members are "above the law or beneath its protection."

According to the Court's press release No 139/26, issued in Luxembourg on 1 October 2026, the proposal has five parts:

  • Scope. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies. A baptismal register holds a "structured" set of personal data and therefore counts as a filing system under Article 4(6), and the autonomy of churches does not change that, so storage, retrieval and use "must be in line with the GDPR."
  • Lawfulness. Processing before the withdrawal request "could be regarded as lawful" under the legitimate interestbasis in Article 6(1)(f), even without express consent.
  • Objection. The person may, in principle, request erasure under Article 17(1)(c) by formally objecting, and the church may then carry on only if it demonstrates "compelling legitimate grounds" under Article 21(1).
  • Archiving. Where that fails, the church may still invoke archiving in the public interest or historical research under Article 17(3)(d) and Article 89(1), provided the processing is necessary, safeguarded and respects the data minimisation principle.
  • Meaning of erasure. Striking data through while leaving it legible, with a note of departure, "does not constitute erasure under the GDPR."

The weighing itself is left to Brussels. According to the Court, "it is for the national court to make that complex case-by-case assessment," in light of the reasons for the request and the likely impact of a refusal on the person.

The dispute from Ghent

The complainant, identified in the opinion as JM, was baptised on 26 June 1955 in the Parish of Bijloke in Ghent. By letter of 25 March 2021 he asked Bisdom Gent, the Catholic diocese in the city, to delete any reference to him from every physical or digital register or archive, relying on the GDPR. The diocese recorded his departure on 2 April 2021, striking the data through but keeping it legible, and wrote on 7 April 2021 that his withdrawal had been noted on the list of church-leavers of the Parish of Ghent.

JM was not satisfied. On 14 April 2021 he repeated his request and, the same day, lodged a complaint with the Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit, Belgium's Data Protection Authority, known as the GBA. By Decision No 169/2023 of 19 December 2023, the authority's Disputes Chamber found that Bisdom Gent had infringed the GDPR, among other provisions Article 5(1)(a) read with Article 6(1)(f), Article 5(1)(b) and (c), Article 9, and Article 12(1) to (4) read with Articles 13 and 17. It ordered the diocese to comply with the request to object and to proceed with erasure within 30 days of notification, according to the opinion.

Bisdom Gent appealed. The Brussels court stayed the case and put five questions to Luxembourg: whether a person baptised as a minor has a right to erasure from the register; whether it matters that the controller says the entry touches its own religious freedom; whether it matters that the register is a book with double-sided pages that also carry other people's details; whether it matters that the book is a historical artefact, so that processing serves archiving or historical research; and whether a marginal note of departure satisfies the right by analogy.

The case drew a crowd. The caption lists 18 joined parties, three associations and 15 individuals. Written observations came from Bisdom Gent, six of the individuals, the GBA, the Czech, French, Italian, Latvian, Hungarian, Austrian and Romanian governments, and the European Commission. At the hearing on 30 June 2026, all of them except the French, Hungarian and Romanian governments also presented oral arguments, according to the opinion.

How the Advocate General reached each point

A register that counts as a filing system

The GDPR reaches manual records only when the data form part of a filing system, and Bisdom Gent and the Latvian government argued the register fell outside that definition. Medina rejected both objections. According to the opinion, Article 4(6) defines a filing system as any structured set of personal data accessible according to specific criteria, the Court reads the term broadly, and what counts is whether the data are arranged by a logic that allows easy retrieval. Baptisms are recorded by parish and, within each register, in date order, which produces what the opinion calls a structured set of a decentralised nature.

The Latvian government pointed out that those criteria do not concern the people baptised. Immaterial, the Advocate General answered: unlike its predecessor, Directive 95/46/EC, the GDPR imposes no such requirement. Nor does it matter that few people can consult the register or that retrieval needs prior knowledge of the event. The test turns on objective features, not on the number of readers. The opinion calls filing systems "the nucleus of archival science" and, in a footnote, traces the lineage to the Pinakes, the catalogue that Callimachus of Cyrene compiled for the Library of Alexandria, which organised up to 500,000 papyrus scrolls. The Court's Research and Documentation Directorate issued a research note on the subject in June 2026, and the opinion records that similar filing-system arguments have been heard before some national courts.

Churches are not exempt. The principles of autonomy and neutrality that stem from Article 17(1) TFEU do not call the GDPR's reach over religious communities into question, according to the opinion, which notes that several provisions, among them Article 9(2)(d) and Article 91, address churches expressly. One temporal limit applies. The first entry made after the 1955 ceremony largely predates any EU data protection rule, so the processing under review is storage and, where appropriate, retrieval and use after the request of 25 March 2021.

Lawful until the objection

Two grounds for erasure were in play: Article 17(1)(d), for unlawfully processed data, and Article 17(1)(c), for data that a person has objected to. The Advocate General took them in that order, because the Court held in its judgment of 9 January 2025 in Mousse (C-394/23) that the right to object presupposes lawful processing. Point (d), she writes, looks backwards; point (c) looks forward.

On the first, the answer depends on Article 6(1)(f), which requires a legitimate interest, necessity, and no override by the person's rights. A further layer applies because the register indicates religious belief, a form of special category data that Article 9(1) prohibits processing in principle. Article 9(2)(d) lifts the prohibition for not-for-profit bodies with a religious aim that process data relating solely to members or former members. Medina finds those conditions met, subject to confirmation by the referring court, and notes that the registers are kept in locked safes or dedicated rooms.

The church's stated interest is the correct administration of the sacraments. Baptism, Bisdom Gent says, can in principle be received only once, so a record guards against a second ceremony. The GBA accepted that this is a legitimate interest and no party doubted it, according to the opinion; Medina agreed, noting that the Code of Canon Law calls baptism "the gateway to the sacraments." Storing the entries also appeared to her an effective measure that serves the baptised, who may need proof of baptism for confirmation or a religious marriage. Against that stand the sensitive nature of the data, the frequent involvement of children, and interference with Articles 7, 8 and 10 of the Charter. In favour of the church, she lists reasonable expectation that the entry exists, a limited scale of processing, restricted access and safeguards against unauthorised access. The result, subject to verification: processing before the objection could comply with Article 6(1)(f), so Article 17(1)(d) gives the complainant nothing for the period before the diocese learned of his objection.

The objection test

The second ground is where the opinion turns. Article 21(1) lets a person object, on grounds relating to a particular situation, to processing based on legitimate interests, and the controller must then stop unless it demonstrates compelling legitimate grounds. The burden sits with the controller. A national court may find overriding grounds only "exceptionally," according to the opinion, which adds that the European Data Protection Board's Guidelines 1/2024 treat the threshold as higher than the one for lawfulness. Medina reads "compelling" as running through all three steps of the assessment: the interest, the need for processing, and the balance.

On the interest, the opinion is favourable to the church. Correct administration of the sacraments is tied to the manifestation of religion and the operational autonomy of religious communities, and can in principle count as compelling. Necessity is harder. The test, in her words, is whether losing the ability to process the data would "critically endanger" the church's ability to carry out its mission.

Several observations cut against it. At the hearing, Bisdom Gent was "unable to provide specific examples" of situations in which a second baptism would be both plausible and likely. Without a centralised register, nothing prevents a baptised person from presenting in a parish whose ministers know nothing of the first ceremony, with or without an entry in the original book. A person wishing to rejoin could prove an earlier baptism by other means, including the correspondence that led to the deletion. Canon 869 permits conditional baptism where doubt exists, so the Church itself does not rule out a second ceremony in every case. And recital 64 of the GDPR, the opinion notes, says a controller does not keep data merely to be able to react to possible requests.

The balance then depends on the person. Medina declines any rule under which one side systematically prevails, and departs from the Commission, which in her description gave little or no weight to the rights of the people concerned. Among the factors she lists: whether someone intending to sever all ties could reasonably expect the community to keep storing his or her data for life and possibly beyond; the absence of consent, since the complainant was a child; doubt that parental authority extends to religious decisions producing a "permanent, irreversible 'lock-in' effect"; and the actual impact on the individual. On that last point the opinion recalls that freedom of religion also covers not holding beliefs, described in case law as "a precious asset for atheists, agnostics, sceptics and the unconcerned." Continued storage may cause emotional distress and, in particular circumstances, affect mental integrity under Article 3(1) of the Charter. The opinion also mentions the idea of "closure" for people who experienced traumatic incidents in their dealings with a religious community.

The proposed answer is that a person baptised as a minor who wishes to dissociate as an adult has, in principle, a right to erasure "where the controller fails to demonstrate compelling legitimate grounds for the processing." Whether the church has discharged its burden is for the national court.

Archiving and historical research

If the church fails on those points, Article 17(3)(d) offers a second line of defence: erasure does not apply where processing is necessary for archiving in the public interest or for historical research, and erasure would be likely to make those aims impossible or seriously impair them. Three conditions must be met, according to the opinion: a qualifying purpose, necessity, and compliance with the safeguards in Article 89(1).

Archiving in the public interest turns, on Medina's reading, on the mission of the body rather than the nature of the archive. The body must act in the public interest, be under a legal obligation to hold the records, and allow some access to them for public authorities or the public; the processing must be "selfless in nature," at least in part. Recital 55 presumes public-interest grounds where official authorities process data for the aims of officially recognised religious associations, and the opinion reads that, a contrario, as creating no such presumption for the associations themselves. Whether Belgian law obliges the diocese to keep baptismal records is left to the referring court.

On historical research, the term is read broadly, though the opinion warns that an expansive reading would let almost any controller invoke it for almost any large dataset. Bisdom Gent confirmed at the hearing that it conducts no historical research itself but stores and makes available data that outside researchers may use. In that case, the opinion says, the purpose is archiving rather than research.

The diocese also argued that the registers are historical artefacts whose integrity can never be altered. Medina finds that "not entirely convincing," because entries are routinely updated with further sacraments or, as here, a wish to distance oneself from the Church. For necessity, the referring court is pointed to the type of research the registers might serve, such as genealogical or sociological work, which data sets matter, and whether the same data exist in other reliable sources such as civil registers. Data minimisation is the guiding principle: researchers may not need the exact identity of each person listed, and aggregated or anonymised data might serve equally well. The test is not absolute necessity, but the impairment must be serious, meaning that the aims become "impossible or considerably more uncertain or burdensome."

Up to four sets of safeguards may apply, according to the opinion: those the GDPR requires of controllers, those the Commission may set, those Member States may or must provide, and those following decisions of the supervisory authority. Article 91(2) places churches that apply comprehensive data protection rules under an independent supervisory authority.

What counts as erasure

Bisdom Gent argued that its marginal annotation amounts to material erasure. Medina found that unconvincing. The everyday meaning of the term, she writes, is "deletion, removal, obliteration," and the annotation is at most a rectification, a distinct right under Article 16 with a different purpose. The right to rectification aims at accurate data; the right to erasure aims at being forgotten. The annotation also increased processing, since new personal data were added to the register and will be kept.

The diocese added that deletion would falsify history. The opinion disagrees: the logic would make almost any erasure a falsification of a past event. The right does not entitle people to remove all traces of their baptism either. Information on a baptism at a given place and time "can lawfully be maintained on the baptismal register," and data minimisation decides what goes. At the hearing, the complainant favoured limiting deletion to his name, surname and date of birth and did not object to pseudonymisation or anonymisation. The aim, in the Advocate General's words, is that the person is "no longer identified or at least is not easily identifiable." Nor does anything in EU law let a person demand that the church treat a baptism as never having occurred; those are doctrinal matters in which, under Article 17(1) TFEU, the Union cannot interfere.

The physical form of the register does not defeat the right. The complainant accepted that pages need not be cut out, and the opinion suggests opaque stickers over the relevant data, with a footnote adding tamper-evident seals or stamps where a religious community is barred from permanent alterations because registers must go to public authorities for archiving. Finding the method is the controller's job: "basic difficulties in identifying those methods cannot excuse the controller" from compliance, the opinion states. That the register is a single paper book, and a unique historical record, changes none of this.

Where the two Court documents differ in emphasis

The press release and the opinion agree on the conclusions, but they frame the church's central argument differently. A footnote to the press release states that, for the Roman Catholic Church, baptism can be administered only once, so it is necessary to prevent believers from being baptised twice. The opinion records the same proposition as Bisdom Gent's own statement of purpose in point 72 and then tests it: the diocese gave no specific examples at the hearing, no centralised register exists, and Canon 869 allows conditional baptism in cases of doubt. Whether the register is needed for that purpose is among the questions the opinion leaves to the national court.

A second difference is one of qualification. The press release says processing before the objection "could be regarded as lawful," while the opinion attaches to that finding, in several places, the proviso that the referring court must verify it.

Why this matters for the marketing community

The case concerns a parish book, not an audience segment. Yet the questions the Advocate General works through sit close to everyday advertising data practice, and PPC Land's earlier coverage supplies several points of comparison.

Erasure comes first. The European Data Protection Board's 2025 coordinated enforcement action focused on the right to erasure, one of the rights on which data protection authorities receive the most complaints. The distinction at the heart of the opinion, between marking data and removing it, has an advertising precedent: France's Conseil d'État upheld the CNIL's 40 million euro fine against Criteo, including findings that the company stopped showing personalised ads to users who asked for erasure while keeping the underlying identifiers. The Advocate General reaches an equivalent view for ink and paper, since an annotation adds to what is stored rather than ending it. Her remark that difficulty in finding a method excuses no controller also has an echo in the EDPB's final blockchain guidelines, which reject technical impossibility as a ground for skipping erasure.

Legitimate interest comes second. The basis lets companies process personal data without consent, and advertising and marketing uses of it are the subject of a growing body of enforcement. The opinion shows how it behaves once a person objects: before the objection, lawful processing cannot be attacked as unlawful, and afterwards Article 21(1) moves the burden to the controller. A Cologne court took a similar sequence in the Snap My AI case, holding that the right to object is reactive and presupposes lawful processing. Regulators have applied the burden elsewhere. Norway's authority forced the gym chain SATS to let members object to check-in photos, and Italy's Garante set Lusha a 60-day deadline for deleting every Italian contact after finding that the company failed each limb of the three-part test. The EDPB's case digest, covering 62 one-stop-shop decisions and five binding decisions, had already described controllers failing that test routinely.

Minimisation comes third. In the opinion it does the sorting: the complainant's own proposal limits deletion to three data points, and the aim is that the person can no longer be identified. The Court applied the principle to targeted advertising in its ruling of 4 October 2024 on Meta, which limited how much personal data the company may use for ads.

The Belgian forum comes fourth. The authority whose order is under review is a familiar name to the industry. It was the regulator that found the Transparency and Consent Framework incompatible with Article 6 and fined IAB Europe 250,000 euros in 2022, and its 2026-2028 plan, published on 23 December 2025, directs enforcement towards large-scale advertising technology platforms and data brokers. Appeals against its decisions go to the Market Court, a section of the Brussels Court of Appeal, which annulled its direct marketing reprimands on 17 December 2025 and, on 7 January 2026, its validation of IAB Europe's action plan. The opinion's direction on erasure is closer to what the authority ordered than to the diocese's position, though the Brussels court decides.

The rulebook comes fifth. A Council presidency draft that would let AI development proceed on legitimate interest drops the unconditional opt-out contained in the earlier proposal, which leaves the conditional Article 21(1) test, the one the Advocate General examines here, as the operative safeguard in that text.

None of this stretches the opinion beyond its facts. It concerns a church and a book, the assessment sits with the national court, and the Court of Justice has yet to rule.

What happens next

The press release stresses that the opinion does not bind the Court of Justice, that the judges are now beginning their deliberations, and that judgment will be given at a later date; no date has been published. A preliminary ruling then goes back to the national court, which resolves the dispute in line with the answer, and the ruling is similarly binding on other national courts facing the same issue, according to the Court.

PPC Land has noted that the Court follows the Advocate General's reasoning in the majority of cases, and Medina's own opinion on body cameras, delivered on 1 August 2025, was followed by a judgment on 18 December 2025 that confirmed its conclusion. Whether the same happens in Case C-12/25 will determine how far the right to erasure reaches into records that religious communities regard as permanent.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Advocate General Laila Medina of the Court of Justice of the European Union; Bisdom Gent VZW, the Catholic diocese in Ghent; the Belgian Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit; the complainant JM and 17 other joined parties; the hof van beroep te Brussel as the referring court; seven national governments and the European Commission as observers.

What: A non-binding opinion in Case C-12/25 proposing that a person baptised as a minor has, in principle, a right to erasure from a baptismal register where the church cannot show compelling legitimate grounds, that archiving or historical research can justify retention only on strict conditions, and that striking data through while leaving it legible is not erasure.

When: Delivered on 1 October 2026, following a hearing on 30 June 2026. The complaint dates from 14 April 2021, the authority's decision from 19 December 2023. The Court of Justice has set no judgment date.

Where: Luxembourg, on a reference from the Court of Appeal in Brussels, in a dispute that began in Ghent. The interpretation of the GDPR would apply across the EU.

Why: The referring court needs an interpretation of Articles 17, 21 and 89 of the GDPR to decide whether the diocese must delete the data, and the answer sets how the privacy rights of former members are weighed against the autonomy and religious freedom of churches.