The state most often violates the constitutionally guaranteed right of citizens to the protection of personal data and this practice must be stopped, a member of the Council of the Agency for the Protection of Personal Data (AZLP) said yesterday. Muhammad Gjokaj.
On the occasion of the International Day for the Protection of Personal Data, Gjokaj told "Vijesta" that the coronavirus pandemic showed that "just like the previous government, the current government continues with the same practice and repeats the same mistakes".
Vlada Duško Marković decided at the beginning of the pandemic, in March 2020, to publish the names of persons to whom self-isolation orders were issued.
This was done based on the positive opinion of two of the three members of the AZLP Council at the time - Sreten Radonjić i Bojan Obrenović.
The interlocutor of "Vijesti" indicated at the next session of the AZLP Council that the controversial opinion is "legally unsustainable and unfounded" and will result in a large number of lawsuits from citizens.
Last year, the basic court ruled in favor of a fellow citizen because her name was on the list of people who were in self-isolation. This case alone cost the state more than 770 euros.
"Since I was opposed to making a disputed opinion and was in the minority all the time, I was still convinced that justice was attainable, which was confirmed by the verdict of the Basic Court," said Gjokaj.
Due to a disputed opinion, Radonjić and Obrenović were removed from the Council at the end of last year by the votes of the representatives of the Parliament of Montenegro.
Gjokaj points out that the Government Zdravka Krivokapića continued with the same practice when in July it made decisions on taking measures to combat the coronavirus, which included that employees in catering facilities check whether guests have a certificate of vaccination or a PCR test.
"On that occasion, the controllers of the Agency, on my initiative, carried out surveillance and concluded that it was an illegal data processing that was caused by a disputed decision of the Government", stated Gjokaj.
The Government's decisions did not contain a clear legal basis that stipulated the obligation of caterers to control the possession of digital covid certificates for entering the premises. The EU authorities have repeatedly emphasized that the legal basis exists only for the use of covid certificates for the purposes of border crossings, but that if member states want to use these certificates for other purposes, such as entering restaurants, they must adopt appropriate national legislation that allows this, such as solutions that exist in France or Austria.
"No such law has been adopted in Montenegro which allows other entities to control the PCR test, but the Government regulates these issues with its decrees, orders or the like, which is a direct violation of the Personal Data Protection Act," he said.
The third case that marked the last year was that the Health Insurance Fund sent more than 50 medical records to Serbia for verification, without the knowledge of the hospital and the patients. After the control of the Agency's officials, it was determined that it was an illegal transfer of personal data from a special category from Montenegro to Serbia.
Gjokaj said that he hopes that Montenegro will have a new Personal Data Protection Act this year that will be in line with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is already in force in the European Union.
Director of AZLP Ivan Medojević said that a special challenge will be the harmonization of the Montenegrin legislation with the legal acquis of the EU, and especially with the GDPR.
"It will be an opportunity to show in action how ready we are to respect EU standards and thus respect ourselves, our personal data and privacy, which we care about only when we feel that they are threatened," Medojević said in a statement.
He added that citizens have not yet understood the importance of personal data protection and publish a lot of information about themselves on the Internet without thinking about the fact that it can be misused. He added that the public interest of every community, including Montenegro, is the protection of the privacy of its citizens, and the role of AZLP is to be "the hub of personal data protection as part of the institutional mechanism."
Referring to the cases of violations of the Law since the beginning of the pandemic, Gjokaj referred to the judgment "Olmstead v. USA" in which US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandis says, among other things, that: "Our government is a powerful, omnipresent teacher. Good or bad, she teaches the whole nation by her example. We must subject civil servants to the same rules of conduct that we expect from citizens. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; calls every man to become a law unto himself; calls for anarchy”.
The International Day for the Protection of Personal Data was marked yesterday, and it is related to the date of signing the Convention 108 on the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data from 1981.
Lacmanović: Backtracked in data protection, plenty of reasons for concern
Former AZLP Council member Radenko Lacmanović said yesterday that there are more bad examples, among which he pointed out that the previous government published a list of civil servants who sued the state in order to exercise their rights from employment.
"People who demanded their denied rights were made enemies of the state and their targets were drawn," he said, adding that citizens can therefore seek justice in court.
Lacmanović referred to the case in which the State Election Commission before the local elections in Herceg Novi used the identification numbers of Montenegrin citizens and checked whether they were available in the databases of the countries of the region.
"Without any control or legal basis, they were de facto acting on the voter lists of neighboring countries and in that way they allegedly tried to 'hunt' those who are registered in the voter lists of Montenegro and other countries," he said, appearing on this morning's TV Vijesti program. Colors of the morning”.
According to him, these cases alone are enough to cause concern and that "we would have to state that we have gone backwards in data protection compared to the initial enthusiasm when the Agency was founded".
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