Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection has forwarded today to the Government of the Republic of Serbia Initiative for Proposing to the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia the Law on Security Checks.
In relation to that, the Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic stated the following:
„The need to implement certain security measures in certain siguations, that is, for performing certain functions and operations, is reality, that is, inevitable fact in every modern state. But exactly due to that, we can not tolerate the fact that there are numerous shortcomings and disputable issues in relation to performing so-called „security checks" in our country.
The matter of security checks has been regulated in Serbia for decades already, by several laws and other regulations, but only in segments, incompletely and inexactly.
The majority of those laws and regulations do not contain provisions on basic terms, subjects that are being checked, purpose and procedure of performing checks, deadlines, etc., leaving too much space for discretionary interpretation and actions of authorities in charge, even individuals.
Several decades long implementation of these, but also of previously valid regulations with the same or similar solutions, has permitted and still today leads to violation of human rights and freedoms, especially of the right to privacy, that is, right to personal data protection. For instance, data processing is often performed without legal basis or legitimate consent of the person whose data are being processed; oftentimes, processing of third party data is performed, as a rule, of family members, for whom the person whose data are processed can not give consent; almost without exception provisions of the Law on Personal Data Protection are disrespected, which regulate the right to be informed about personal data procesing, the right to gain insight into them, right to have a copy of those data, etc., for which the Law envisages midemeanor accountability, and in certain cases also criminal accountability.
The Law, the passing of which I hereby initiate, should enable the authorities in charge to perform security checks in all the situations estimated and envisaged by the Law, and according to the Constitution (envisaging in Article 42 that „collecting, keeping, processing and using personal data shall be regulated by the Law", what security checks surely are) as necessary, but such solutions should simultaneously be clear, precise and harmonized with the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia, Personal Data Protection Act, as well as with generally accepted rules of international law."
