The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection has appealed today to the Serbian Government to withdraw the Bill on Detective Services from the Assembly procedure.
The Commissioner reminds that during 2010 he pointed out the serious shortcomings of the solutions which were included in the then Draft Law, but the Commissioner’s remarks were not taken into consideration obviously. Now, not even asking for the Commissioner’s opinion, on December 30th, 2011, the Government proposed a new, basically very similar Bill. The Commissioner estimates that this Bill contains obviously unconstitutional provisions, and that, in many of its provisions, it is controversial, contradictory, and unclear. In the Commissioner’s opinion the adoption of the Bill could create possibilities for the violation of privacy and misuse of personal data.
Concerning this, the Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic has also said:
“The Serbian Constitution in Article 42 specifically stipulates that collection, keeping, processing and the use of the personal data is regulated by law. And the Bill on Detective Services, in direct opposition to this constitutional provision, envisages that, when personal data records are concerned which the detective agencies or entrepreneurs keep, “more specific content of the data and the way of keeping the records is prescribed by the Minister”.
The Bill stipulates that public authorities and legal entities which keep the records based on public responsibilities, and what is particularly incomprehensible, “others handling personal data”, that is basically everybody who has any personal data records, have an obligation to provide the detectives with the personal data of the citizens, and the legal basis for this should be the contract between the detective and his client, that is the client’s authorisation. Thus, one of the basic principles of the Personal Data Protection Law is denied, according to which the personal data processing is allowed only when it is explicitly regulated by the law or when there is the explicit consent of the person whose data is in question.
The Bill with completely fluid formulations stipulates the persons whose data detectives can process, e.g. “the missing persons or persons in hiding” or “persons who have caused damage to the client in question” or persons who “work anonymously against the client thus violating his privacy”. At the same time, the Bill does not stipulate how to prove those facts, which makes possible the interpretation that for their “existence” it is enough to have a simple claim of the client and that accordingly an unlimited number of citizens can access personal data.”
