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A Public Official from Bălți Complained to the Police that a Journalist Disclosed Personal Data in an Article

13 April 2018
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În Moldova
Serghei Strul, the Head of the State Labor Inspectorate from Bălți, filed an application to the police on April 5, 2018, claiming that the newspaper SP Bălți infriged the law on the protection of personal data in an investigation article regarding his family’s properties and businesses. The material spoke about him, his wife, who works in the prosecutor’s office, and his mother, insisting that they owned a few commercial facilities in the city.

The journalists of SP claim that the information in the article was collected from official sources, especially from the declarations that Strul made public previously. Moreover, after the article was published, the editorial office offered to the Head of the State Labor Inspectorate from Bălți the right to reply, but he refused to use this right.

Strul believes that the journalist Iuri Rotaru, the author of the article, should not have included information about his parents into the article. Strul commented for Media-Azi.md: “The fact that they wrote about me and took information from my declarations can be understood. But why did they write about the life of my parents, who are not public figures? I think this is neither correct nor legal.”
Asked by SP Bălți for an opinion about this case, the lawyer Vitalie Zama from the “Lawyers for Human Rights” organization drew attention to the fact that in this case the provisions of Article 10 of the Law on the Protection of Personal Data are applicable. Among other things, it stipulates that the law does not apply to public figures or acts involving public figures.

According to Article 10 of the law, "the provisions of articles 5, 6 and 8 shall not apply where the processing of personal data is done solely for journalistic, artistic or literary purposes, if it relates to data that have been made public on a voluntary and manifest basis by the subject of personal data or to data that are closely related to the status of public person of the subject of personal data or to the public nature of the acts in which he is involved, under the terms of the Freedom of Expression Law.”