The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection believes that the way competent authorities address the issue of liability for breaches of the Law on Personal Data Protection (LPDP) and the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance (LFAIPI) is inadequate as a deterrent and in fact encourages offenders to break the law.

A particularly grave concern is the fact that liability of officials for breaches of the law is an issue that is commonly "swept under the rug", diminished and misrepresented in the eyes of the public.

The Commissioner believes it would be beneficial and quite instructive for a realistic review of the way the government treats the situation in the field of personal data protection if the Ministry of Justice or other competent authorities publicised e.g. figures showing how many persons – if any – have been sentenced by valid and enforceable judgements for the criminal offence punishable under Article 146 of the Law or any other criminal offence in connection with unlawful processing of personal data in the six years since the enactment of the LPDP. Not only is it difficult, nay impossible to find examples of officials being held to account for violations of the law; rather alarmingly, we have recently heard from officials of certain public prosecution offices they were "unable" to "retrieve criminal reports from the electronic database" in some cases. This is worrying because it means some cases may have become lost and that is certainly not something that should be happening in a normal state of affairs. Either way, publication of relevant figures would most certainly reveal a huge gap between the "penal policy" and the actual situation, which is burdened with a myriad of issues and fraught with serious, grave violations of the law and the right to personal data protection, including compromised security of huge databases of personal information controlled by public authorities.

Another disconcerting fact is that the Ministry currently in charge of freedom of information, namely the Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government, appears to follow in the footsteps of the Ministry of Justice, which brought virtually no infringement charges against the offenders for three years.

In this context, it is rather out of place for the Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government to justify this practice by referring to alleged "differences in interpretation of the law." The clear and unambiguous provisions of Articles 46, 47 and 48 of the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance, which list punishable offences, leave no scope for different interpretation and the Ministry has a duty to bring infringement charges against perpetrators as part of its oversight powers. Thousands upon thousands of infringements have been committed in recent years and the Commissioner has reported hundreds of the most drastic and flagrant cases (which commonly involved multiple offences) to the Ministry, even though it was not his duty to do so. Considering that the Commissioner has sent 271 such cases to the Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government in the last 10 months (since that Ministry took over the responsibility for these matters) and the Ministry has initiated only 4 infringement proceedings, any further comment seems unnecessary.