A number of employees in judicial authorities asked for the attitude and opinion of the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection concerning a request of the Supreme Judicial Council and the State Council of Public Attorneys for them to fill in a Questionnaire which contains a large number of personal data, many of which are particularly sensitive, in connection with the forthcoming staff downsizing.
In this regard, Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic will send letters to the Supreme Judicial Council, the State Council of Public Attorneys and the Ministry of Justice explaining that processing of personal data in this specific case is not compliant with provisions of the Law on Personal Data Protection from several aspects.
In connection with this, Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic also said the following:
"Not questioning the importance of staff downsizing in the public sector, including of course the judiciary, I think it is my duty to point out that there is no practical need or valid legal basis for such scale and intensity of personal data processing.
Taking into account constitutional and legal arrangements, any processing of personal data is allowed only either on the basis of consent of a person in question or on the basis of a ground expressly set under the Law and in this specific case none of these bases exist. Nor does the allegation that the requested data constitute the criteria for determination of redundancies according to the provisions of the General Collective Agreement provide a justification. The General Collective Agreement is not a law. Furthermore, setting aside the validity of the formal justification, where a collective agreement is used as the primary and main criteria for identification of employees whose work is no longer needed, it is necessary to assess their performance. Only when employees have the same level of performance can their financial standing be used as an additional criterion. And only if they have the same level of performance and the same financial standing is it justifiable to apply other additional criteria which may require processing of particularly sensitive data, such as data on health status, pregnancy, disablement or cognitively challenged children etc.
Collecting of such data from all employees is unnecessary and contrary to elementary principles of personal data processing - proportionality and appropriateness and thus it is not compliant with the Law on Personal Data Protection."
