Personal privilege for all: Personal Data Law hardly functions
Home address and telephone number of the Judge Olga Borovkova were made public after she had sentenced Sergey Udaltsov to 10 days of arrest.
Several bloggers have published detailed information on the Judge and insulted her.
The Judge herself has, as yet, refrained from any comments on the appearance of her personal information in the Internet. However, the Association of Lawyers of Russia reacted yesterday. The lawyers wrote that they were convinced that all court issues, no matter the degree of public attention drawn to them, were to be settled only within the legal field. And any attempt to exert pressure on the judge to make a certain decision is inadmissible. The Association requested the Ministry of Internal Affairs to investigate the matter.
This fact of harassment of a judge is not the first one. Personal information on the judges from the capital who considered some celebrated cases was also uploaded to the Internet.
A week ago, Boris Nemtsov filed a request to the Investigation Committee demanding to initiate an inquest against the news agency which had published records of his phone talks. The check has not yet been completed.
The management of the mass medium replied by telling Interfax that they “were accustomed to investigations”, but that “We turned out to be better businessmen then Nemtsov and earned more on him than he did on us”, and kept on publishing. Thefts and publication of personal data are becoming a common occurrence. The authorities of the European Union have prepared a set of strict measures against companies infringing the immunity of personal life of the citizens. Violators will have to pay fines of up to five per cent of consolidated income of all departments, no matter where these are located. These innovations will be published in January 2012. Meanwhile, we are having problems with punishments for disclosing personal data.
Alexander Petrov, Advocate:
- Constitution stipulates the right to secrecy of correspondence, phone talks, postal, telegraph and other messages. Limitation of this right is only admissible if fixed by a court decision.
The Penal Code of the Russian federation sets out criminal liability for violation of the secrecy of phone talks (Article 138 of the CCRF). No matter in what way the phone talks information is made available for other persons – by uploading of audio records to the Internet, by publishing their print-outs etc. As far as the placing in the Internet of information containing the details of another person goes, it is not that simple.
Constitution fixes the immunity of private life. The CCRF provides for liability for violating this immunity. But in this case the law operates with the term “personal and family secret”, while the information on the place of residence or, for example, on the phone number is neither. Consequently, a person may not be brought to criminal liability for disclosing such data. The law “On personal data” classifies the address and phone number information as “personal data”.
Article 7 of this Law stipulates that operators and other persons who gain access to the data may not disclose them without the data subject’s consent. Therefore, it may be stated that disclosing such data is in principle illegal. But any sanctions may only be applied in certain circumstances, namely – in relation to persons who obtained such data pursuant to their service duty. This is bringing to disciplinary or administrative liability.
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