Reaction to the announcement of the Ministry of the Interior

Anti-corruption policies · 29/10/2013

In fact, most of the databases that make the Central registry of citizens, are in the possession of the Ministry of internal Affairs, and non of these databases is not registered with the Agency, that can be confirmed simply by inspection of the register of the Agency which is available on its website. Among other things, these are the evidence of citizenships, residence, and whereabouts. Exactly these registers, which are special records, as well as part of he Central population register of citizens, represent the highest amount of personal data in Montenegro that purposely can be misused.

It is MUP who oversee the Law of the central population registry implementation, which is recognized by that law, so the claims that MUP does not have jurisdiction over the Central population registry are not truthful, even though that register is formally ran by the Ministry of Informational Society and Telecommunications.

Moreover, MUP did not provide for the Police, which operates within it, to register its databases with the Agency, which also leaves additional space for the misuse of personal data, even those that police obtain during the regular contact with the citizens, but also through the surveillance, monitoring, and other methods of secret supervision. For this reason, we call the police to stop media manipulation and to ensure that all the databases owned by that institution are registered with the Agency, in order to minimize the potential misuse of personal information.

Clearly this practice shows that in Montenegro protection of personal information is only the base for concealment of corruption and organized crime, and it is specifically used to hide data that could point on this phenomenon, such as the deletion of the identification numbers from the registers of the Tax Administration and land registry. On the other hand, a huge amount of personal data that could be misused, like this one that is in possession by MUP and Police, stays out of reach of the Agency, and apparently is not an interesting issue for any institution of the system.

MANS