Citizens have increasingly been contacting the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection because of activities of political parties that send their activists to visit citizens at their home addresses, which the citizens perceive as harassment and often also as inadmissible personal data processing.
The Commissioner lacks the power and the means to prevent anyone from making unsolicited visits to citizens' home addresses; however – and this should go without saying – he would like to remind citizens it is entirely up to them to decide whether they want to let party-political activists into their homes or answer their questions and they are by no means required to do so.
The Commissioner finds it rather telling that citizens are protected, at least on paper, from unsolicited visits by door-to-door salespersons, agents and service providers by a set of consumer protection provisions contained in several laws, but that there are no legal provisions which would protect them from harassment by party-political activists. The competent authorities should review this in order to determine whether such different legal treatment is justified.
As regards the suspicion that party-political activists carry out unauthorised personal data processing during these visits, the Commissioner would like to underscore once again that personal data processing is lawful only if authorised by the law or if the data subject has freely given his/her consent. Where these grounds for processing do not exist, personal data processing is inadmissible, which means that a person who carries out such data processing is committing an infringement under Article 57 of the Law on Personal Data Protection.
Furthermore, as regards the suspicion that party-political activists use official electoral rolls or extracts from electoral rolls, the Commissioner notes most emphatically that any unauthorised provision, disclosure or use of personal data collected, processed or used under the law for purposes other than those for which they were intended constitutes a criminal offence under Article 146 of the Criminal Code. A specific form of this criminal offence, indeed its most serious form, occurs when it is committed by an official, in which case it is punishable by up to three years of imprisonment. In this context, the Commissioner considers it worrying and disappointing that public prosecutors' offices have not acted as expected although there have been numerous instances of reasonable suspicion of multiple criminal offences.
