Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection, Rodoljub Sabic has invited all responsible persons to undertake whatever is necessary to prevent infringing of the rights on personal data protection in the procedure of forming special electoral register for election of National Councils for National Minorities.
The Commissioner evaluates that it would be really bad that efforts directed towards affirming democratic rights of the national minorities should be overshadowed by infringement of human rights, but he also warns that there are indications pointing out that this could happen, because a certain number of citizens have contacted the Commissioner on that basis.
In relation to that, the Commissioner, Rodoljub Sabic, has also stated the following:
„In relation to those appeals of the citizens, I have already taken the necessary steps. Starting from the assumption that behind possible endangering of rights on personal data protection, stands primarily insufficient knowledge of the contents of Personal Data Protection Act and of the Law on National Councils of National Minorities, and not bad intentions, I expect that the measures undertook shall have desired effects.
However, I remind you that jobs of organizing and selection implementation for National Councils shall be performed by the Ministry for Human and Minority Rights and other legally determined authorities. Nobody else can perform data processing on that basis, which means that nobody could collect and form records of electoral registers or other lists of persons enrolled into special electoral registers, and especially special “private”, political party and the like collections of data based on photocopy of requests or based on personal documents, that is, inventory of persons with addresses, phone numbers, etc. And the right to submit an application for enrolment in a special electoral register on a specially prescribed written form belongs to the citizen (only to him), and it can not be performed by someone else instead of him.
Undertaking personal data protection, especially of very sensitive data, without clear, legally determined base or explicitly freely given consent of the person whose data shall be processed, is the activity which is prohibited according to the Personal Data Protection Act (Article 8) and shall be punishable as an infringement (Article 57), and simultaneously, according to the provisions of Article 146 of the RS Penal Code can even be a criminal act.“
