The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection Rodoljub Sabic has warned the Ministry of Interior of the Republic of Serbia (MoI) that the publication, without lawful authority or consent, of the photographs and video records of persons deprived of liberty and the textual data determining the identity of the persons, constitutes unlawful processing of personal data.

In this regard, the Commissioner, Rodoljub Sabic has stated the following:

‘’After the supervision of the implementation and enforcement of the Law on Personal Data Protection, it has been ascertained that the MoI is publishing video recordings of deprivation of liberty, which have been made by the MoI officers, on its official web site accompanied by the text containing the personal data of the persons deprived of liberty. It has also been ascertained that, the same officers have published photographs and video recordings and data on file servers of the Internet service - YouTube. In addition, the Ministry has also been publishing the said video recordings and the text containing personal data on its profile on the social network Facebook.

The video recordings and the data of these persons published in this manner clearly define the identity of the persons and are available to an unknown number of persons who can access them based on various search criteria.

Such processing of personal data is prohibited under the Law, not only because there is no legal basis for it, but also because the number and the type of personal data processed is obviously disproportionate to the purpose of data processing.

Namely, the need to inform the public on the crime combating activities is reasonable, and also the need for some of those activities to be especially promoted may be fulfilled completely by publishing video recordings in which the persons deprived of liberty are made unrecognizable and maybe only their initials are disclosed, without any other personal data.

In addition to the reasons set forth by the Law on Personal Data Protection, one should keep in mind a very important presumption of innocence, set out in the Constitution and the legislation, based on which everyone shall be presumed innocent until convicted by a final judgment of the court. And unjustified and full disclosure of the identity of a person who is only suspicious and later often turns out to be innocent, may have very unpleasant and sometimes irreparable harmful effects on the person.

Since data processing in the manner described above is not only inadmissible pursuant to Article 8, items 1 and 7 of the Law on Personal Data Protection, and since this action also challenges some other rights guaranteed under the Constitution on the results of the surveillance I have informed the Ombudsman on the Warning that I have sent to the MoI, as well.“