Bill on protection of private information passes first reading

The Parliament voted in the first reading on Friday, November 10, a draft law regarding protection and processing of private information. According to the bill, the private information or data that allow to directly or indirectly identify a person can be of two kinds: accessible to the public, such as family name, surname, father’s name, year and place of birth, residence, telephone number, information regarding profession etc., and of special categories with private character, such as ethnical or racial origin, health state, as well as criminal record. The goal of the project is to create and develop the national legal framework in private data protection field and to regulate the collection, preservation, automatic processing, broadcasting and use of information; establishing the rights of the possessors of personal data and the obligations of those that process this information. Iurie Stoicov, chairman of the Parliamentary Committee for National Security, Defense and public order has declared in the sitting that the mentioned law draft has been recently analyzed by the Council of Europe, which concluded that this law draft contains positive regulation norms of data with personal character in the Republic of Moldova, and is in accordance with the European standards. The CoE also presented certain objections, one of which addressed the National Center of private data protection, the institution that should be formed by the law draft. The objection was regarding the authority of the Center in the field of assuring protection of the human rights and freedom in processing private data, as well as the ability to influence the state policy in the field and to represent the Republic of Moldova’s interests in international bodies. According to Stoicov, these competences could be undertaken by the parliamentary lawyers from the Human Rights Center. Several deputies, including the vice-president of the parliamentary fraction of the Democratic Party, Vladimir Filat, declared they are against offering these responsibilities to the Center of Human Rights, in order not to double its functions. Filat declared for the press that “the issue is the fact the Republic of Moldova didn’t have such an important law for a long time”, and that is why certain points of the draft are controversial. The deputy expressed his hopes that during the debates of the second reading the suggestions of the Council of Europe will be taken into consideration. Until now, the collection and processing of citizen’s private data was done by several state institutions, such as the Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Ministry of Health and Social Protection, and the Ministry of Informational Development.