Act of 30 July 2018 Article 9 and GBA/APD Biometric Recommendation and Enforcement

Loi du 30 juillet 2018, Art. 9; GBA/APD Aanbeveling nr. 01/2021; GBA/APD Beslissing ten gronde nr. 114/2024

A citation is an address, not a summary. The first part names the law; what follows narrows it to the exact section, article or paragraph.

What follows is LexLint's own research summary of this law, not legal advice.

In force since 5 September 2018.

A biometric privacy rule binding public and private bodies.

As of 24 August 2026.

What it requires

Do not rely on employee consent as the legal basis for a workplace biometric time-registration or access system in Belgium; the Litigation Chamber fined an employer 45,000 EUR for exactly this in Decision 114/2024.
Expect no statutory basis to exist at all for biometric authentication processing in Belgium outside explicit consent and the eID/passport exception, per GBA/APD Recommendation 01/2021's own finding of a legal lacuna.

What it reaches

Excludes recording-derived identifiersNo

What this law does

Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.

Belgium has no dedicated biometric-identifier statute; a biometric identifier is General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Article 9(1) special-category data, plus Act Article 9's access-designation and confidentiality duties. GBA/APD Recommendation 01/2021, read in full, concludes there is at present a lacuna in Belgian law such that any biometric authentication processing lacking explicit consent, other than eID and passport processing, has no legal basis.

Litigation Chamber Decision 114/2024, read in full, fined an employer 45,000 EUR for fingerprint-based workplace time registration, holding that employee consent failed the power-imbalance analysis and that record-keeping and DPIA duties were also breached.

The GBA/APD's own publication search returns zero results for voice recognition and 16 results for facial recognition, none of them a decision, so Belgium has no facial-recognition Litigation Chamber decision and no voiceprint guidance at all, established from the regulator's own index rather than an inference.

When LexLint raises it

processes_biometrics
processes_voice

Read the law

GBA/APD Aanbeveling nr. 01/2021 (full text)
GBA/APD Beslissing ten gronde nr. 114/2024 (full text)

Every line above is drawn from the primary source linked here, read on the date shown. This is a research summary, not legal advice.

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