The issue of whether Legal Notice 76 is in line with the EU Data Protection legislation is still to be assessed since the new legislation has not yet been implemented, PN re-elected MEP candidate Roberta Metsola has told The Malta Independent on Sunday.
Dr Metsola was replying to questions made by this newspaper as to whether the Legal Notice (LN), which enables the Education Minister to request privacy data of students attending educational institutions from childcare to university level, could be affected once the new EU legislation is implemented.
The LN has been temporarily suspended by the minister until a working group, set up by the Commissioner of Data Protection, issues its findings on the implications of the LN.
The LN was approved in Parliament after a motion presented in Parliament by the Opposition calling for its revocation was rejected by the government after a vote was taken. The government has a majority of nine seats; therefore the likelihood of an Opposition motion going through is highly unlikely if the government disagrees with the motion.
But a month or so down the line, the LN has been suspended.
The LN was met with concern by parents and the Opposition due to the fact that it is now perfectly legal for the minister to go as far as requesting ‘ability’ reports of students as young as two or three years old, meaning reports tied to learning difficulties of students.
Dr Metsola put forward a question to the European Commission as soon as the Legal Notice was published after a number of parents had communicated their concerns to her on the unprecedented amount of data the minister will be able to gather on every person enrolled in our education system.
“Since the concerns were raised and I submitted my parliamentary question, the government was forced into urgently appointing a Data Protection Commissioner (the post had been left vacant) and is now reportedly looking into the effects of the Legal Notice.
“It is of some satisfaction therefore that the pressure the Opposition put on the government has seen some (albeit little) progress being made and has kick-started a debate on privacy and data protection,” she noted.
The reply given to Dr Metsola by Vivianne Reding on behalf of the European Commission was that the commission is not in a position to assess the compliance of the Maltese Legal Notice with the proposed General Data Protection Regulation since the proposal is still under discussion by the Union’s co legislators.
Dr Metsola said that there are still a lot of people out there who are concerned and there are still a lot of unanswered questions, namely: Who are the people who have access to this data? Do they have security clearance? Where is this data physically being stored? What security safeguards are there to ensure it does not end up in the wrong hands?
On the fact that the Minister claimed that the Legal Notice has in effect been suspended, she said that the LN has not yet been repealed and is therefore still law and will remain so until it is repealed.
But the minister, in a statement issued this week, assured the public that the LN has not been enforced as yet.
“The new EU Data Protection legislative package has not yet been implemented and it remains to be seen whether this Legal Notice is in line with that.
“The European Commission will only look into it once this becomes law,” she explained.
“What is crucial is that we need to continue to have a wide, mature debate on the data the government holds on its citizens, the manner in which it is collected and the need for the increased safeguards for our privacy in a digital age. There is too much at stake not to,” she added.
This issue of the legal notice on children’s privacy data also comes at a time when the issue of wiretapping by the Malta Secret Service is heating up, and the Ombudsman filed a judicial protest against the Home Affairs Minister after he requested information from the ministry tied to the investigation of cases involving AFM injustices.