Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection, in his letter to the Prime Minister, expressed satisfaction that at the meeting on 18 August 2017, a full agreement was reached on the necessity that the citizen personal data registers, whose establishment is planned by the Government, is to be regulated by law and must not be based on by-laws or ministerial agreements.
The Commissioner will conduct and complete the supervision procedure over the Ministry of State Administration and Local Self-Government (MDULS), as well as the Ministry of Interior, as set off by the Agreement on Business and Technical Cooperation aimed at "the forming of electronic records on citizens of Serbia", and will inform the Government and the public about the respective results, especially considering that answers to all open questions will be important for the work of the Working Group, to be formed by the Government in order to prepare the appropriate law.
The Commissioner once again submitted the Model Law on Personal Data Protection to the Prime Minister, (also accompanied by the letter to the Prime Minister, personally) which, although sent on July 6 this year, have not been delivered to her!
Commissioner expressed a complete lack of understanding of this situation, pointing out that, even starting from a (delicate) assumption that the General Secretariat, Government’s Notary Office, or the like, forwards by default some letters addressed to the Prime Minister personally, to “the stakeholder” ministries, it is incomprehensible that the Prime Minister remains completely unaware about the letter sent to her, by the state body about the very important matters, with no reaction whatsoever, not even with a curtesy answer, so to say, the memo and the attachments cannot be traced, and to interpret it freely, they were "eaten by darkness".
The Commissioner also estimated that the thing making the whole situation even more uncomfortable is that the same happened with the Initiative for the adoption of the new Personal Data Protection Law, prepared by the Commissioner, which was sent to the Prime Minister by seventeen NGOs. A copy of that Initiative, he also sent in the attachment.
The Commissioner reiterated that he left the Model entirely available to the Government, emphasizing that by putting the Model in the Government and the Assembly’s formal procedure, the new Law on Personal Data Protection, which is otherwise necessary, could be obtained in a relatively short period of time, with possible corrections during the public hearing.