MIA of Georgia Fined 500 GEL for Personal Data Processing Violation

The Personal Data Protection Service has found the Ministry of Interior of Georgia guilty of violating the principle of processing personal data and has fined it 500 GEL, the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association/GYLA reports.

The case concerns 43 people arrested for alleged violations of Articles 166 (petty hooliganism) and 173 (disobeying he police) of the Code of Administrative Offences during a protest on 8 March in front of the Parliament building in Tbilisi.

At the stage of presenting the cases of the arrested persons to the court, a “notification” was submitted as evidence in the case files of each individual, which contained the personal data of 43 arrested persons – name, surname, year of birth and legal grounds for administrative detention. Thus, despite the fact that the cases were considered individually, there was information about other persons in the files of each individual.

In its decision, the Personal Data Protection Service stated that “there is no need to process information about other arrested persons within the framework of the ongoing proceedings against a specific person”. Accordingly, the publication of information about other persons in the existing cases against detainees was considered a violation of the Law of Georgia “On Personal Data Protection”.

The statement notes that although the Personal Data Protection Service has issued a number of decisions on illegal data processing by the Ministry of the Interior, the systematic resolution of such violations by the Ministry remains a problem.

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