The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection said today that the submission of several dozens of personal document sheets of judges and trainee judges of the Commercial Court of Belgrade by an anonymous sender to a large number of media was an action which unreasonably compromised the judges' privacy and constituted a gross violation of the Personal Data Protection Law. The Commissioner called on the media to refrain from publishing the information they received.

In this regard, Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic said:

"I am not aware of the underlying reasons for this action, but whatever the motivation this is quite obviously a serious, worrying breach of provisions of the Personal Data Protection Law.

"The data contained in the personal sheets sent to the media constitute official secret under the Court Management Law. Even if that Law did not identify these data as official secret, their public disclosure would be inadmissible under the Personal Data Protection Law. Material requirements for any disclosure of personal data without the consent of the data subject concerned include: existence of legal grounds; processing solely for purposes specified in the law; and processing only to the extent necessary for achieving the intended purpose. Quite obviously, these requirements are not met in this specific case.

"It is also obvious that the requirements for potential waiving of the privacy protection guaranteed by the law in due procedure, pursuant to the Law of Free Access to Information, are also not met.

"Such gross violation of the right to personal data protection is always worrying, all the more so because it is done in a judicial institution. In my opinion, this event just goes on to confirm what I said before: we are in fact not even aware of the possible scope for jeopardizing privacy through illegal protection of personal data, just as we are not aware of the possible consequences of irresponsible handling of personal data by public authorities under the law in terms of protection from loss, destruction, unauthorized access, publication etc. This event has to be seen as another very serious warning that more effort is needed to create the necessary assumptions for actual implementation of the Personal Data Protection Law."