Economic and Social Council
1. The Bureau of the Conference of European Statisticians was asked by the heads of the statistical offices of Austria, Slovenia and Switzerland to arrange time during the course of the 1995 plenary session for the Conference to discuss work being undertaken by the Council of Europe and its Working Party on the Protection of Personal Data on the preparation of a set of recommendations on the protection of personal data. The recommendations are intended to refer to the protection of various types of personal data, including personal data collected for statistical purposes.
2. This background note on the work of the Council of Europe's Working Party No. 13 in this field has been prepared by Eurostat at the request of the Bureau.*
3. The Council of Europe has given its Working Party No. 13 the mandate to facilitate the use of the Principles formulated in Convention 108 and in Recommendation No. R (83)10 by drafting a new recommendation on the protection of personal data collected and processed for statistical purposes, adapted to the development in the domain of Data Protection. The Council of Europe has indicated that since the draft recommendation is not yet a public text it could not be reproduced as part of this note. However, the ECE secretariat had indicated that it will have copies of the text of the draft available at the plenary session in case members of the Conference would like to consult it.
4. The Working Party is composed of experts nominated by governments; Eurostat has the status of observer at the Working Party's meetings. The states' experts are mostly lawyers from the domain of the Data Protection authorities, statistical experts are in the minority.
5. The result achieved in the current version would probably not present major problems in the implementation of official statistics. The definitions and the principles are now formulated in a way which, in general, is not incompatible with existing statistical practices. Nevertheless, in some important aspects, the recommendations do not adequately reflect the specificities of statistical data processing and the potential risks on privacy.
6. One problem is that there is no distinction between "Official" statistics and "private" statistics. The (draft) recommendations are tailored for official statistics but with a view that also "private" statistics are also within their scope. That may suggest that there are potential risks where there are none in the domain of official statistics, following the rules of public law, e.g.:
7. A second problem concerns the adequate formulation of rights. Even though personal data collected and processed for statistical purposes are never used for verification against the data subjects, the latter are given (in the current draft) a general right of rectification.
8. Similar consideration of the protection of personal data has also taken place in the EU. The Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council, which will be adopted in the near future relates in the rectification of personal data to "having regard to the purposes for which they were collected or for which they were further processed". Although the Data Protection Directive is only a general act, the (draft) Recommendations of the Council of Europe focus specifically on Statistics. Thus a clear statement could have been expected that the right of rectification is not infringed in public statistics, all the more as the data protection directive recognizes expressly public statistics to be a matter of important public interest.
9. If deemed appropriate, the Conference may wish to comment on the proposed draft recommendation, and ask the Council of Europe and its Working Party to take the views of the Conference into account in further work on the development of the proposed Recommendation.
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* Editor's Note: Statistical offices of the following
countries were represented at the most recent meeting of the
Working Group: Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany,
Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, The former Yugoslav Republic of
Macedonia, and United States (Bureau of the Census).