The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection received today a visit from the Drug Policy Network South East Europe to discuss the Draft Law amending the Law on Psychoactive and Controlled Substances.
The Commissioner told the representatives of the Network that he shared their view it was necessary to obtain input from as many stakeholders in the professional community and the civil sector as possible to ensure that the legislative provisions in this sensitive and important field are sound and proper, noting that the way in which the public hearing on the Draft Law and its timing (26 December – 20 January) had not been conductive to this.
The Commissioner promised to support the efforts of the Network and its member NGOs in this context, but noted that many of the issues were mainly within the remit of other state authorities.
The Commissioner noted that the authors of the Draft Law had not sought his opinion, although the Draft contained a number of provisions that were highly relevant both from the viewpoint of personal data protection and from the viewpoint of freedom of information. He explained that, if his opinion had been sought, he would certainly have pointed to a number of provisions that were controversial or unacceptable taking into account the existing constitutional and legal provisions.
As an example in the field of personal data provision, the Draft Law includes provisions which, in addition to the Government’s existing drug enforcement office, establish the powers of the new “Centre for Monitoring of Drugs and Drug Addiction”. Although this is not clearly stipulated, it is reasonable to assume that this Centre would also process personal data (including sensitive data), but it is not specified what types and what amount of personal data it would process. Furthermore, a number of provisions of the Draft Law leave it to the Minister to decide on the processing of certain personal data, in contravention of the constitutional provision which states that this can be done only by a law.
As regards freedom of information, the Draft Law omits any amendments to Article 95 of the existing Law, although amendment of that Article is de facto necessary because it is not only too rigid and designed to deny public access to virtually all information, but also contains terms and concepts such as e.g. “official secret”, which have become obsolete and were eliminated from Serbia’s legal system many years ago, because they are not included in the Law on Classified Information (2009).
