The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection hosted today with the support from “Telenor” company a meeting titled “Personal Data Protection in Electronic Communication – Duties and Responsibilities of Operators”.

Jasna Matic, Minister for Telecommunications and Information Society, and Milan Jankovic, Director of the Republic Telecommunication Agency (RATEL), made addresses at the meeting and participated in it. Directors or representatives of major operators and providers in Serbia (Telenor, Telekom, PTT, Vip, Eunet, Verat, SBB etc), experts and representatives of several public authorities and NGOs also took part in the meeting.

In connection with this, Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic said the following:

“Today’s meeting should be the first from a number of similar meetings. According to European standards, personal data protection implies execution of duties of which many people are unaware. The good news is that the meeting showed the operators had clear ideas of possible problems and that they are ready to face those problems and tackle them. I think that a similar level of readiness is yet to be ensured in most of the public authorities. We should register all problems the magnitude of which we are not aware and talk openly about them. Of course, elaboration of those problems must also imply participation of experts from national security structures and I am sure it will be ensured as early as at the next meeting.

The state must provide in all fields and particularly in the extremely delicate field of electronic communications the arrangements which will adequately respond to issues and risks in discourse they engage in - maximum possible quality of services, requirements for the state security and the fight against crime, protection of privacy and other human rights. The last must be and remain the most important.

The importance of human rights for democratic legitimization of a society itself makes personal data protection an issue of paramount importance. In addition to that, this issue has huge impact in the context of European integration. It is not by accident that a specific article of the SAA emphasizes a duty of our country to harmonize its legislation in this field with European standards and to have an independent supervisory authority capable of ensuring implementation of those standards in practice. Ever since the SAA was signed, the authorities, especially executive ones, have been taking this duty irresponsibly, even disparagingly and apart from some activities of the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection, very little has been done at the national level. We should not expect that the EU will turn a blind eye. We can and must make up for the delay and change our attitude.”