Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection, on the occasion of the adoption of the Personal Data Protection Strategy, estimates that the attitude towards the implementation of this strategy is a sad illustration of the generally irresponsible attitude of the state towards the circumstances in the important field, the field of human rights.
The Commissioner reminds that by adopting the Strategy, the Government of Serbia has determined that "it shall adopt the Action Plan for the Implementation of the Strategy, within 90 days from the date of its publication, with defined activities, expected effects, executors of specific tasks and deadlines for the completion of the tasks."
On the same occasion, the Government also determined that "it will form a special working body to oversee the provision of conditions and the implementation of the Strategy and Action Plan, coordinate the state bodies in order to effectively handle the personal data protection system, report to the competent authorities on the implementation of the Strategy and on identified problems during the implementation, also modifying the Strategy, in accordance with new needs or identified shortcomings. "
Even seven years later, we do not have an Action Plan, or a "special working body", but "we do have" the absence of a number of necessary and ruling acts and activities.
This incomprehensibly irresponsible attitude is illustrated by the fact that after adoption of the Regulation on the Protection of Particularly Sensitive Data, the Government, has been lagging behind the deadline set by the Law on Personal Data Protection for more than eight years! The "work" on the preparation of the Proposal of the new Law on Personal Data Protection, took five years, without any result, and against all odds, although the Commissioner had prepared and put the complete model of the new law available to the Government almost three years ago, that did not help, nor did his recent, newly prepared Model which is aligned with the EU General Regulation on the Protection of Personal Data, adopted in the meantime.
The absurd lagging in the adoption of the Action Plan was also a subject of a warning of the European Commission. Government envisaged in the action plans to meet the recommendations of the EC, that the Action Plan for the implementation of the Data Protection Strategy will be adopted in mid-2013. However, it did not pass it. Regarding the repeated objections of the EC, a new deadline in mid-2014 was established, etc., but the Action Plan for the implementation of the Strategy has not been adopted to this date. More or less the same thing is happening with the adoption of the new Law on Personal Data Protection.
Although currently, in EU’s relations with our country, things other than human rights have a priority, the facts mentioned above will sooner or later be a serious problem in the accession negotiations with the EU. But more importantly, they represent and will represent a constant source of problems and severe and robust threats to human rights, the protection of which the state owes to its citizens.
State activities in this area are mostly limited to the activities to the Commissioner, and although his activities have been increasing (the number of cases in the area of personal data protection increased from 83 in 2009 to around 2,500 in 2016), they cannot be a replacement for what should be done by the competent ministries, the Government and the Assembly.
Commissioner will continue to protect citizen rights through his activities. However, in concrete circumstances, this is objectively just a "flame retardant", because since long Serbia has been missing what is necessary - a systematic elimination of the source of the problem followed by the establishment of a new, modern personal data protection system.