In a letter submitted to the National Assembly, the Government and a number of Ministries, the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection provided the latest version of a document prepared by the Bureau of the Consultative Committee of the CoE Convention 108 for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data and invited these authorities to give their contribution to the improvement of planned amendments to and modernization of this truly fundamental international document in the field of personal data protection.

In that regard, Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic also said the following:

“This invitation is based on the belief that the build-up to the elections must not mean suspension of work, particularly of work on things important for the exercise, improvement and protection of human rights. Just because we have elections ahead, it does not mean everything should grind to a halt and that is why I already said that it would be a shame if the National Assembly, by adoption of some already drafted laws, the Government, by enactment of secondary legislation, and other authorities by appropriate actions fail to do what they are realistically capable of achieving in this regard until the new convocation is sworn in.

The Council of Europe is preparing modernization of the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data and the Additional Protocol to the Convention with the aim to adopt the improved international agreement this year. The main ideas are the introduction of new, more stringent data protection standards and strengthening of independent authorities which should protect those standards.

Work on that has been entrusted to the Consultative Committee of the Convention, in which all Parties have representatives and which has the Bureau of the Consultative Committee as its working body. One of the eight members of the latter is one of my associates. Last year my associates and I managed to secure a seat in this body for a Serbian representative for the first time since the signing of the Convention, which improves our chances of having a say in this matter. 

The latest draft of the document “Modernization of the Convention 108” has been prepared and all Parties are invited to submit comments which will be considered at the next meeting of the Bureau which will be held from 16 to 18 April 2012 and the Consultative Committee of the Convention should adopt the final version early in summer.

I, as the Commissioner, will certainly give appropriate proposals and suggestions concerning the prepared text, but taking into account the cross-sectoral importance of personal data protection and the objectively poor situation in Serbia, I thought it was necessary to draw the attention of a wider circle of authorities to the duty to contribute