On 22 June 2018, CPDP expressed a legal statement in response to a request from the Chief Prosecutor of Republic of Bulgaria, regarding the application of Regulation (EC) 2016/679 when publishing press-releases and granting information for the purposes of journalism from the Prosecutor’s Office.
In its legal statement, CPDP conducts an analysis on the questions concerning the application of the new European data protection rules, set out by Regulation (EC) 2016/679 (General Data Protection Regulation) and Directive (EC) 2016/680 for the protection of personal data in police and criminal activities.
In response to the posed questions, CPDP expressed the following:
„1. Publishing the personal data of an accused person in pre-trial proceedings on the Prosecutor’s website is legitimate when a statutory obligation or a prevailing public interest is present. In the cases, where for the purposes of public interest, it is impossible or inappropriate to publish the information in an anonymized or pseudonymized form, then pointing out the name, duty or place of work of the accused would be sufficient for the purposes of public awareness, whereas publishing the ID, address, relations to third parties outside the process and so on would be excessive.
2. As a rule of thumb, personal data of other parties to a pre-trial proceeding, such as witnesses, experts, or linked to these categories third parties and others, should not be published or revealed, so long as regarding the latter there is no statutory obligation or prevailing public interest. An exception might arise for persons occupying senior public positions pursuant to Art. 6 Counteracting Corruption and on Seizure of Illegally Acquired Property Act, which because of the nature of its activity has an influence over society, or when publishing the information protects vital interests of the data subjects.
3. All cases where personal data of participants to pre-trial proceedings is published or granted to media should follow the principles of data processing laid out in Art.5 Regulation (EC) 2016/679, and more precisely the principles of keeping data to a minimum with regards to achieving the purpose of processing, data accuracy and limiting the retention period.”
With the subsequent letter, the Chief Prosecutor expresses his gratification from the quick reaction of CPDP on the posed questions, as well as approval, in view of public importance, for the legal opinion to be published on the institutional websites of the Office of the Prosecutor of Republic of Bulgaria and the Commission for Personal Data Protection.
The full text of the legal opinion is published HERE.
