The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection said that passing of the Compulsory Instruction on the Conditions of Use and Maintenance of the Video Surveillance System for City Roads and Crossroads for the City of Belgrade by the Ministry of Internal Affairs was a constructive and useful response of this Ministry to the Warning he served on it.

In early April, upon supervision of implementation of the Law on Personal Data Protection in connection with illegal use of the video recording titled “Near the Belgrade Arena” from the video surveillance system, the Commissioner served on the Ministry of Internal Affairs the Warning with 14 counts, stating that lack of necessary procedures and certain safety omissions resulted in this incident.

Commending the Ministry of Internal Affairs for passing the Compulsory Instruction and taking certain protective technical measures, Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic also said the following:

“By passing the Compulsory Instruction, the Minister of Internal Affairs stipulated the procedures for use and maintenance of the video surveillance system in the manner which will reduce the risk of abuse of the system several times.

Thus, for example, introduction of the individual electronic identification card system will precisely define the circle of persons who can actually access the video surveillance system and the exact period of time in which each of these persons accessed the system will also be registered.

Both employees and officials at the Ministry of Internal Affairs will be able to access the system only with individual electronic cards. So, there will be no exceptions.

Introduction of internal video surveillance of all premises in which work stations for monitoring of the signal from the video surveillance system are placed will enable constant control of access to the system.

Although the measures taken are not particularly advanced measured by the criteria of the modern international environment and are considered standard in the context of personal data protection, yet they have to be commended in our specific situation since they are, without any doubt, good and useful.

This not only because they will considerably reduce the risks of abuse of this specific video surveillance system in Belgrade, but also because they can and should serve as an example for other, more or less similar video surveillance systems established every day in Serbia without enough control.”