On a request from several media to comment the amendment to Article 45 of the Law on Personal Data Protection set by the Judiciary Committee of the National Assembly and accepted by the representative of Serbian Government, Commissioner for Information Rodoljub Šabić said the following:

“I still think that the best and the only consistent solution would be to accept what the Ombudsman and the Commissioner propose, i.e. the deletion of paragraph 2 of Article 45. As it is, I can say that on the general level the new formulation of Article 45 is certainly better than the previous. True, this was not actually a problem because the arrangement proposed in paragraph 2 was extremely bad without these subsequent corrections and it left the possibility for security structures to perform any illegal processing of information if they wished and to eliminate possible intervention by the Commissioner invoking even ostensible security reasons since nobody could control them. They would themselves be in a position to decide whether there would be protection of data at all, which I dismissed as a logical and legal nonsense announcing resignation should this arrangement be adopted in the form it has been proposed. The Supreme Court of Appeal is included in the mechanism of Article 45 by the new formulation in a way that it envisages the possibility of limiting the Commissioner's authorities only after obtaining the relevant opinion of the president of this Court and this is a different thing in principle.

However, on a technical level the formulation of this new solution seems, to say the least, awkward and disputable from the aspect of some basic legal postulations, at least to me. Underlying this solution is the assumption that the president of this Court is an “authority”, although only the Court itself can be termed thus; another underlying assumption is the “binding nature” of something which is not binding by definition because no one's opinion is binding. In my opinion, the practice will show that the solution is virtually inapplicable, i.e. that its possible application could endanger the security interests the Government purportedly wants to protect by this. This is why I am convinced that this arrangement cannot survive for a long time and that it will disappear from the legal order at the latest by the adoption of the Law on Secret Data Classification. And it would be best if deputies adopted the Ombudsman's amendment which is still a current issue during voting on amendments and prevent this arrangement becoming a part of the legal order.”