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Raising awareness on protection of personal data

Protection of personal data is one of the most active areas of the Council of Europe intervention providing expert support to the Ukrainian authorities in amending the relevant legislation and raising the state servants and other professional groups’ awareness. Efficient functioning of the data protection system and its further improvement is one of the main tasks for the Ukrainian state on its path to the European integration and implementation of the European standards that could be inextricably linked with the protection of human rights and freedoms, including the right to private life.

The Council of Europe has launched a series of tailored trainings on application of the data protection legislation and data protection principles in public and private environment in the framework of the Joint EU/CoE Programme “Strengthening Implementation of the European Human Rights Standards in Ukraine”. The goal is to support the Ukrainian authorities, namely the Office of the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner on Human Rights (Office of the Commissioner) in spreading information about the notion and sense of data protection as well as to raise awareness of the Ukrainian citizens, especially public servants whose work are often connected with personal data processing.

Two trainings were organized in Uzhgorod (20-21 April) and in Kharkiv (6-7 July). They gathered more than 60 representatives of the educational sphere – administrative officials of schools, colleges, universities and staff members of the city and region councils from different regions of Ukraine. When dealing with or creating registries and processing personal data, representatives of the aforementioned institutions very often encounter problems with the application of data protection legislation, as well as with finding the proper balance between the rights to privacy and to freedom of information. All these problematic issues were explained and thoroughly considered within the trainings, by providing participants with useful recommendations and clear guidance on how to deal with concrete cases based on the current legislation, including ECHR and ECtHR case-law.

The specifics of these trainings is that they are based on the results of the monitoring visits carried out by representatives of the Commissioner’s Office to some institutions on the eve of the trainings in each region where they took place. These results were used  to discuss with the participants more practical cases from their daily work and improve their skills on identification of violations of personal data protection requirements and potential prevention of such violations in the future.

Further work in the area of personal data protection will be supported by the Joint EU/CoE Programme “Strengthening Implementation of the European Human Rights Standards in Ukraine”. It will continue the awareness raising activities during the autumn-winter 2017 and carry out extensive work on the finalisation and adoption of amended legislation, in line with the European Union’s regulatory shifts and the Council of Europe’s Convention 108.

Kharkiv 7 AUGUST 2017
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