In a letter sent today to the Minister of Health, Mr. Rodoljub Sabic, Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection, emphasized the necessity and urgency of passing the secondary legislation envisaged by the Law on Organ Transplantation in order to address open issues regarding personal data protection in the field of organ donation.

Saying it was unacceptable that the other side of the coin of organ donation, a very important activity from the human aspect which had been the subject of numerous promotional campaigns, was a lack of proper legal arrangements and non-compliance with the law, i.e. shortcomings which could be the source of serious risks of mass violation of basic human rights and reminding that he drew the attention of the Ministry of Health to the same issues in the mid-2011, Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic also said the following:

The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection passed a ruling temporarily banning the Marketing and Services Company “Аpex Solution Technology” from processing personal data, in particular serial and alias numbers of personalized SMART cards within the ticket charging and public transportation management system in Belgrade, the so-called Bus Plus system.

In that regard, Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic also said the following:

In connection with the commendation of the European Data Protection Day, Mr. Rodoljub Sabic, Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection, said that the improvement of personal data protection was one of the main challenges for the Republic of Serbia in 2012.

“Harmonization of Serbian legal order with European personal data protection standards and serious work on the implementation of these standards in practice is a twofold duty of the state. It is important to make up for delays as s soon as possible. We are bound to do this both by our formal duties and, more importantly, the need to improve the protection of citizens’ privacy, i.e. to minimize the risk of abuse of their personal data. At a time when CoE and EU are establishing new, more rigorous personal data protection standards of higher quality, it is high time we provided at least implementation of the old ones.”