On occasion of 10 December, the International Human Rights Day, the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection has issued a warning that the fact that significant segments of human rights are not regulated in a proper manner, always involves the risk of threats to and violations of those rights. In this regard he has recalled that the Government of the Republic of Serbia launched an initiative for passing the Law on Security Checks more than two years ago.
In this regard the Commissioner, Rodoljub Sabic, has stated the following:
''It is undeniable that in certain situations, i.e. for the purpose of performing certain functions or jobs, there is a need to conduct appropriate security checks. This need is a reality, or even inevitability, in any modern state. However, precisely due to both the importance of security checks and the fact that they, in the logics of things, represent perhaps the most invasive interference with the privacy of citizens, numerous gaps and issues in connection with the conduct of ''security checks" in our country should not be tolerated.
Security checks have for decades been regulated by several primary and mainly by secondary pieces of legislation in Serbia, but only segmentarily, partially and imprecisely.
The majority of the primary and secondary legislation does not contain provisions on the basic concepts, purpose, scope and procedure of conducting of the checks, and the deadlines etc., which leaves too much leeway for arbitrariness and interpretation at the discretion of the competent authorities, including individuals, which may have unpleasant, grave consequences for citizens who are subject to checks.
For decades, the implementation of the legislation has led, and even today it leads to a series of violations of human rights and freedoms, particularly of the right to privacy, i.e. the right to personal data protection. Data processing is often carried out without legal justification or lawful consent of the data subject, and very often third-party data is being processed while a valid consent of the data subject cannot be obtained, and almost without exception, the provisions of the Law on Personal Data Protection governing the rights of citizens in relation to data processing are not complied with, although the law envisages misdemeanor, and in certain cases criminal liability in this regard.
At the time when the initiative was launched, the Law, which passing I initiated back in October 2012, was verbally supported, but even two years after that nothing was done in this regard. I take this opportunity to stress once again that we require a law which would enable our public authorities to conduct legal security checks in all situations in which it is estimated and defined as necessary by law, (pursuant to Article 42 of the Constitution ''collecting, keeping, processing and using of personal data shall be regulated by the law"), in accordance with the rules which are compliant with the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia, the Law on Personal Data Protection, and the generally accepted rules of international law, which are transparent, precise and predetermined, thereby excluding or at least minimizing the inconsistency and arbitrariness which are the real sources of human rights violation."
