Source: Danas
The Government did not provide conditions for the implementation of the Law on Personal Data Protection
Rodoljub Sabic Personal attitude
By all likelihood, we will get another action plan in the near future.
One of the Deputy Prime Ministers of the Government said at the session of the Committee for European Integration that the Government would adopt within several days - on 11 December - additional action plan for 2009 in order to fulfil all duties necessary for liberalization of visa regime and that the liberalization of visa regime would be addressed at the meeting with the EU representatives one week later.
It was announced that forty key issues for the liberalization of visa regime would be analyzed and that European experts would visit Serbia in the first quarter of 2009 in order to check whether the conditions were met. It may seem somewhat unexpected, at least to uninformed persons, that the otherwise proverbially optimistic Deputy Prime Minister Mr. Bozidar Djelic also said at the same occasion that it does not guarantee that the visa regime will be waived for the citizens of Serbia. But he justified this pessimism, which is not pleasant for most of our citizens, or realism, if you would rather call it that way, by the fact that "changed circumstances and global economic crisis made more difficult all EU processes, including those relating to Serbia".
I share with the majority of our citizens the desire for our country to be in the visa waiver program with the EU as soon as possible. Taking into account the importance the laws for which I became competent have exactly within that context, as a public officer I also feel personal responsibility for fulfilment of those common desires. This is exactly why the said announcement of the additional action plan attracted my attention, as well as its content which is virtually reduced to the passing of a number of new laws.
What attracted my attention in particular was the anticipation that those desires would probably remain unfulfilled because of "changed circumstances and global economic crisis".
The Serbian Government adopted the Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) with the EU last year and it was signed at the beginning of this year. Article 81 of the Agreement expressly envisages that our country shall harmonize legislation referring to personal data protection with acquis communitaire and other European and international regulations on privacy. Serbia made a commitment to form an independent supervisory body with enough financial and human resources in order to monitor efficiently and to guarantee the implementation of the national legislation regarding personal data protection. Together with the activities on the SAA the Government was preparing the new Law on Personal Data Protection which has been adopted recently and its implementation should start as of 1 January 2009. Proposing this Law, the Government particularly emphasized its extreme importance in the process of the EU association and meeting the conditions for visa regime liberalization and inclusion in the visa waiver program with the EU. Regardless of the Commissioner's and Ombudsman's interventions, the formulation of the famous Article 45, which provides for "independence" of a supervisory body in a way which literally does not exist anywhere in the world, remained in the text of the Law exactly because the Government insisted on that. The (im)possibility of the Law receiving a passing mark from European experts should be evaluated in the light of that fact.
Let us leave aside the issue of the harmonization of this Law with the European standards and pay attention to factual issues important for functioning of "independent supervisory body with enough financial and human resources". That body is not new; on proposal of the Government and by will of legislator the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance became responsible for the protection of this important segment of human rights.
The Commissioner has been facing large problems for years, which include specific obstruction by the Government. Even within the framework of the old competences he faced increasingly large workload. The number of cases exceeded five thousand a long time ago and many of them are extremely complex and delicate. Still, the Commissioner works in completely inadequate premises with several times lower number of people in the Office than envisaged. I always, almost without fail, see a smile of disbelief or irony on the faces of my foreign colleagues when they hear that I perform my work with only seven associates (two technical secretaries, one driver and only four lawyers). In Slovenia, a country with a population four times smaller than Serbia and with incomparably more legal order, the Commissioner works with four times more people. He has ten inspectors and the Serbian Commissioner has none. It should be clear to everyone, particularly to the Government, that the number of his associates compared to the workload is tragicomically small. There are several hundreds of unsolved cases at this moment and their solving requires several months' work without inflow of new cases. What does acceptance of the new, several times larger and much more complex power, which is in the competence of bodies with incomparably higher number of employees in other countries, means in these conditions?
And it should be clear to everyone that the implementation of the Law will also be extremely important for European monitors' evaluation. In order to provide some sort of a starting point for the implementation of the new Law, the Government should use the time until it enters into force to ensure at least the bare minimum of conditions for the work of the supervisory body, i.e. the Commissioner.
And how did the Government treat that problem? As someone who does not care about that at all.
In this situation, without questioning the effect of global economic crisis on virtually all walks of life, I am convinced that the Government should seek explanation for the unfortunately very likely "Shengen failure" in its own omissions. Not so much because of the guilt, but in order to rectify those omissions. For this kind of approach in the implementation of new laws guarantees neither achievement of desired goals nor new quality in human rights protection. It only guarantees that those goals and rights will be jeopardized. The author is the Commissioner for Information
