Commissioner for Information of Public Importance, Rodoljub Sabic, in the letter sent to the Prime Minister of the Government of Serbia, appealed to the government representatives to abstain from statements by which unrealistic importance is allocated to the very fact of adopting the Law on Personal Data Protection, as one of the conditions for approaching White Schengen List and the EU. He asked the Government to direct its attention on things which are much more important for reaching those goals. Evaluating that some important issues have been chronically and in an unacceptable measure underestimated, the Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic stated in relation to that:

“The laws can secure the desired effects only if they receive a passable grade regarding the standpoint of harmonization with the European legal standards, and from the standpoint of their application in real life. One must not close eyes facing the fact that in relation to this, when we speak about Law on Personal Data Protection, very big problems can occur, and that without delay one can undertake everything to remove them if that is at all possible.

Speaking about harmonization with the European standards, the main problem shall still be famous Article 45 of the Law. It is good that preliminary proposed incredibly bad formulation has been changed. However, even the new formulation, even that it is generally speaking, better than the old one, is still based on the idea that someone can suspend and limit legally stipulated authorities of supervisory body. International standards envisage full independence of supervisory bodies, so such decision does not exist anywhere but in our country, and therefore it is not likely that it would, when the time comes, receive a passable grade by the EU observers.

Regarding conditions for law implementation the things are also in very bad shape. It has been envisaged that the functions of the supervisory body and protection of the rights shall be taken over by the current Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and that is already from January 1st. And that Commissioner is for years already facing big problems, which besides else include specific obstruction by the Government of Serbia. The Commissioner was also within the current authorizations facing big and constantly growing scope of works and he also works in inadequate conditions, with the service which is several times smaller than the envisaged one. Therefore even at this moment there are several hundreds of outstanding cases, which even without a new inflow, require several months of work. Simultaneously the Government of Serbia is chronically, for years ignoring logistics, space related and other problems of the Commissioner, for the resolving of which it is in charge, and despite the repeated requests by the Commissioner and by the public, it persistently fails to activate certain mechanisms important for achieving freedom in accessing information. It is absurd to expect in such conditions from the Commissioner to properly respond to additional, much heavier tasks, of bigger scope and complexity, which are even in the countries with much less population performed by excellently supported bodies with several times bigger number of employees. If the quoted circumstances shall not be changed without delay, already minimal chances shall be not only directly endangered to secure implementation of the Law on Personal Data Protection, but the achieved level of implementation of the Law on Free Access to Information shall be questioned.”