The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection estimates that with regard to personal data protection, the Negotiating position of the Republic of Serbia for the intergovernmental accession conference on opening Chapter 23, is inferior to Serbia's actual needs and to what it is obliged and capable of performing in this area.

It is disquieting that the content of this document, adopted by the Government recently, indicates that taking measures that should have already been taken, not only for the sake of the EU accession negotiations, but more importantly, for the sake of protection of our citizens' constitutionally and legally determined rights will further continue to be delayed indefinitely.

The fact that the document contains literally no information on incomprehensibly long delay of the Action Plan on Implementation of Personal Data Protection Strategy is particularly worrying, given that this document's existence and implementation is a necessary precondition for achieving any improvement in the greatly neglected area of personal data protection.

The Personal Data Protection Strategy was adopted in mid-2010. The Action plan on its implementation was to be passed within three months, as envisaged in the Strategy. It has not been passed and its passing was "consistently" postponed despite our reality confirming the urgent need for its adoption on a daily basis and in a dramatic manner.

The fact that the authors of the starting position continue ignoring the need for setting out the Action plan on Implementation of Personal Data Protection is more so surprising given that the Commissioner discussed the problem with the Prime Minister who entirely agreed that the Action plan is indispensable and announced that it was going to enter the "accelerated procedure".

The negotiating position envisages further delay in passing the necessary new Law on Personal Data Protection. This has been done for several years in a row by scheduling its adoption for the end of a calendar year. With regard to that, it should be reiterated that the Commissioner submitted the integral wording of the Model law with detailed explanations to the Ministry of Justice and the Government as early as October 2014. The text of the Model law went through a public hearing and was subject to appraisal of European experts and practitioners from the subject area. With an additional public hearing in accordance with the obligations laid down in the Rules of the procedure of the Government, and the resulting possible amendments, it could compensate, or rather, it could have compensated for shortcomings and a huge legal uncertainty caused by the existing law.

In addition, by passing of this law, numerous detrimental effects of perennial Government's delay of adoption of the important Regulation on the Protection of Particularly Sensitive Data would be prevented and eliminated.

The Commissioner estimates that it is worrying that the starting position contains both statements and views that are not in line with real and factual data. Such an approach can result in creating a false impression with the other negotiating party or, even more undesirably, in self-delusion.