Church allowed to process private data of non-Catholics

A ruling by the Data Protection Appeals Tribunal has allowed the Catholic Church to retain personal data of people who are no longer Catholics, and who wish to have such data deleted from the Curia's records.

It is not clear if this is a ruling applicable only to the Church, as part of an exemption written into the Data Protection Act... or if the same principle will be applied in other cases, also: thus allowing other associations and institutions the right to retain and process data of persons who are not their members.

But while the Church has been allowed to retain such data against the data holders' express wishes, the same ruling also provides for a special annotation to be made to the original records, to confirm that the person in question will no longer be considered a member of the Church.

Earlier this year, the Data Protection Commissioner Dr Joseph Ebejer had rejected a collective request presented by the group Not In Our Name (NION) - which seeks to assist Maltese non-Catholics in ending their formal association with Catholicism - to force the local Curia to delete baptism records on request.

Ebejer's decision was upheld on appeal this week, in a ruling that NION menbers argue may expose certain flaws within the Data Protection Act.

"The crux of the issue is that our parents gave their consent to have us baptised (under parental authority), and that according to the law our adult consent can only be revoked on 'compelling legitimate grounds'," NION member Ingram Bondin, who presented the case, told MaltaToday.

The case for deletion was based on two fundamental human rights: privacy, and freedom of religion.

"The tribunal concluded that these two rights, when balanced against the need of the Church to keep these records to administer their sacraments, was not a 'compelling legitimate ground'..."

Bondin added that while the group was disappointed by the overall decision, it nonetheless welcomed the wider implications of the ruling, in that it creates a precedent whereby Church records may now be annotated to show that an individual has opted to leave the institution.

"It's not exactly what we wanted, but it remains an improvement over the situation in other countries like Poland: where the Church has resisted even the annotation of records," Ingram Bondin said.

NION is currently studying the implications of the ruling, and there are no immediate plans for further legal action at this stage.

"The next step is to inform our members, and anyone interested in dissociating from the Catholic Church, that there is no longer any need to go through lengthy and unnecessary bureaucratic procedures - for instance, being interviewed by the Curia's Chancellor and confirmed an 'apostate' - to achieve this aim.

"As a result of this ruling a simple letter should be enough. We will be providing our members with more details on precisely how to go about this in the near future."