Press Releases - Archive

The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection considers the estimates that the termination of the Portal of Courts of Serbia, which has been explained as the consequence of the ruling adopted by the, misinterpretations of the meaning and content of the ruling.

Pursuant to the Law on Personal Data Protection (LPDP) the Commissioner's ruling pronounced a ban against the Ministry of Justice relating only to further processing, i.e. publication of personal data of parties and other entities involved in the proceedings before courts, because it is performed contrary to the law and without legal grounds, and the ban does not apply to the operation of the Portal as a whole.

As previously mentioned, the Commissioner deems the Portal of Courts a useful and good tool to offer a wealth of information regarding the work of courts to the public on a proactive basis: on the jurisdiction and organization, on judges, on the number and types of civil disputes, criminal proceedings, extra-judicial proceedings and enforcement proceedings, on the manner of communication with the court, bills for court fees and deposits, and many other data regarding the operation of courts. There are no statutory limitations for the publication of the data (of course, with exception to those listed in the ruling on the ban) and the Commissioner in this regard expects the Portal of Courts to continue to operate smoothly.

In addition to the above, the Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic has stated the following:

 On occasion of the five years of implementation of the Law on Personal Data Protection the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection has estimated that Serbia is facing a number of problems. The Commissioner deems that it is necessary for the Government of the Republic of Serbia and the National Assembly to take a more active stand in relation to the status in the field of personal data protection because otherwise, due to existing deficiencies in the legal system and inconsistencies when introducing new solutions to the legal system, the number of violations of the human rights guaranteed under the Constitution will constantly grow.

Stressing that, while fully accepting that there are objective problems, some of the omissions are incomprehensible, the Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic has said the following:

The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection has forwarded letters to the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia, the Government of the Republic of Serbia and the Ombudsman regarding the Bill on the General Administrative Proceedings (LAP). The Commissioner has expressed concern regarding the content of certain provisions concerning the right of access to information, and regarding the ways in which these provisions have found themselves in the Bill.

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

The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection has sent to the Minister of Foreign and Domestic Trade and Telecommunications a letter regarding the Draft Law on Amendments to the Law on Electronic Communications today. The letter indicates that it is necessary to exclude all formulations from the text of the Bill that could cause a dilemma regarding the grounds for access to the data on citizens' communications and that is necessary to establish the obligation of providers to keep records of the number of accesses to the data.

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