Refusal to refer the QPC regarding the right to access bank account information: a non-event?

Last Friday, the Conseil d'Etat that the preliminary ruling on constitutionality (QPC) challenging the constitutionality of the right to disclose bank account information did not need to be referred to the Constitutional Council.

He therefore considers that there is no serious question as to whether Articles L.81 and L.85 of the Code of Tax Procedures violate the rights guaranteed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

While this decision may come as a surprise to some, it is fully in line with the Conseil d'Etat ruling Conseil d'Etat provisions on unannounced inspections.

It would, however, be premature to assert at this stage that the Conseil d'Etat resolved the issue of whether these communication rights comply with the European Convention on Human Rights, or that it does not intend to be influenced by the judgment handed down by the ECHR regarding Italian legislation (ECHR, Feb. 6, 2025, No. 36617/18).

In fact, the Council was concerned here solely with the issue of the application of constitutional standards, and there appear to be no decisions in constitutional case law that would support the argument that the communication rights at issue in the QPC violated the right to an effective remedy or the right to privacy.

The fact that the decision was not published or cited in the Lebon collection suggests that the Council does not wish to attach significant weight to it. This might not have been the case had it intended to rule on the issue of compliance with the ECHR.

Above all, while the rights guaranteed by the ICCPR and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen may appear similar, the scope of the principles guaranteed by these two texts is not identical.

The Conseil d'Etat therefore wish to wait until a case arises in which the issue of whether the right to communication complies with the ECHR is raised, in order to rule explicitly on the matter. This would allow it to submit a request for an advisory opinion to the European Court of Human Rights, something it was unable to do in the context of the present QPC.

This decision may therefore amount to nothing more than a non-event in the ongoing legal battle over the validity of the right to information. In any case, it serves as a reminder of the significance that the legal provision in question can have in litigation challenging the legality of the law.

EC, 9th and 10th Chambers, June 12, 2026, No. 513952, unpublished

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