The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection forwarded the Proposal of the National strategy for personal data protection to the Government. This Proposal was composed together with the European Commission experts. Moreover, the proposal was debated at the international regional event held in Belgrade in mid-May. Following the event, domestic experts were also consulted. Also, the proposal underwent public debate for 3 months. Upon analyzing the suggestions, final version of the proposal was drafted and forwarded to the Government of Serbia. (The full version of the Proposal can be seen at www.poverenik.org.rs, by clicking on the 'Archive' section of the website).
Stating that the enactment of this document is very important for faster European standard implementation in this field of human rights, the Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic asserted the following:
'By ratifying the EU Stabilization and Association agreement we consented to harmonizing our jurisdiction with European standards on personal data protection, as well as ensuring the actual implementation of those standards in practice. However, even without that formal obligation, it was high time to start changing the circumstances in this unregulated field of human rights.
By adopting the new Law on Personal Data Protection and ratifying the Additional Protocol to the Convention 108CE approximately a year ago, this large commitment has not been fulfilled, but only formally established. Unfortunately, not much was done in the past year that could and should have been done. We are alarmingly late when it comes to standard harmonization, getting the citizens and the general public acquainted with the importance and the influence of their newly acquired rights, and establishing an efficient mechanism of independent standard application supervision. The consequences of this tardiness have to be overcome as soon possible, or, else, this will become a grave problem in our association to the EU.
In these hard economic conditions, fulfilling the aims set by the Government and the executive authorities is considerably more difficult. The Proposal of the National strategy for personal data protection, which defines key aims, necessary measures and activities, as well as the role and the responsibility of the Government, the Commissioner and other entities, is an attempt to help meet the set objectives and execute international commitments. The experiences of other transitional countries, tell us that it is very important for the Government to adopt this or similar document, since the existence and the implementation of a clearly defined strategy is an important supposition for achieving the necessary results.'
