In a letter sent today to the Minister of Health, Mr. Rodoljub Sabic, Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection, emphasized the necessity and urgency of passing the secondary legislation envisaged by the Law on Organ Transplantation in order to address open issues regarding personal data protection in the field of organ donation.

Saying it was unacceptable that the other side of the coin of organ donation, a very important activity from the human aspect which had been the subject of numerous promotional campaigns, was a lack of proper legal arrangements and non-compliance with the law, i.e. shortcomings which could be the source of serious risks of mass violation of basic human rights and reminding that he drew the attention of the Ministry of Health to the same issues in the mid-2011, Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic also said the following:

“As early as in mid-2011, the Commissioner performed supervision of all three institutions which promote voluntary organ donation – the Military Medical Academy, the Nephrology Clinic of the Clinical Centre Nis and the Clinical Centre of Vojvodina. Some of these shortcomings have been rectified thanks to good cooperation with the staff of these institutions.

However, certain major shortcomings can be rectified only by the Ministry of Health.

The Law on Organ Transplantation envisages the Minister’s duty to regulate by secondary legislation keeping of records, protection of data on organ donors, the donor card form and the conditions an institution which issues donor cards must comply with and to lay down the manner and the procedure of keeping the Single Republic Organ Donor Register and entering of organ donors in this Register, keeping and protection of data, the procedure to access data, the manner and the procedure of issuing and keeping of codes etc.

The legal deadline for passing of such secondary legislation expired at the end of last year, and taking into account previous negative experiences with compliance with deadlines, I urge again the competent institution to pass it as soon as possible because of the evident risk of violation of many people’s rights.

Currently, processing of blood and organ donors’ data is not performed in the manner stipulated by the law, the procedure is not the same for the entire territory of Serbia and donors’ data are not adequately protected.

Since organ donors’ personal data are processed in the manner which is not compliant with the law, the Commissioner should ban such processing, particularly taking into account the fact that those are the data classified as particularly sensitive under the law. Of course, I will not do that because of the vast human importance of this activity, and because of that I urge the Minister one more time to pass the necessary secondary legislation without delay.”