Obrada podataka o nacionalnoj pripadnosti i praćenje ostvarivanja manjinskih prava u Srbiji
PROCESSING OF DATA ON NATIONAL AFFILIATION AND MONITORING THE QUALITY OF MINORITY PROTECTION IN SERBIA

Author(s): Ljubica Đorđević
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, Constitutional Law, Governance, Public Administration, Sociology, Electoral systems, Ethnic Minorities Studies
Published by: Институт друштвених наука
Keywords: national affiliation; processing of personal data; Serbia; national minorities; official records
Summary/Abstract: In Serbia, general constitutional and statutory preconditions for collection of ethnic data exist. The Constitution guarantees that expression of national affiliation is free and voluntary, the Law on national minorities opens the possibility to record the data on national affiliation in official records, and the Personal Data Protection Law lists several cases in which processing of ethnic data is permitted. Furthermore, various sectoral laws call for collection of data on national affiliation, under condition that expression of national affiliation is voluntary. Despite these generally positive preconditions, several fundamental problems exist. The relevant legal framework is not always consistent and uniformed, and some examples show that provisions on collection of data on national affiliation are simply “inserted” in the law without thorough considerations. On the other hand, in some cases, law calls for the monitoring the ethnic structure (of employees), but provisions on how this should be done, i.e. on the collection of data on national affiliation are missing. The main cause for all these inconsistencies and weaknesses is the lack of clearly defined indicators for monitoring of the quality of minority protection in Serbia, which would serve to systematically define areas in which data on national affiliation should be collected. Without this, the areas in which such data are to be collected are defined ad hoc, unsystematically and without thorough considerations, usually as reaction to demands of minority representatives or recommendations of international monitoring bodies. And even in these areas, it is not always clear for which purposes the data on national affiliation are being collected. Finally, even when data on national affiliation are being collected, they are not further processed and analyzed to serve as background information for development of policies and/or monitoring of their effects.

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