The Data Protection
Commissioner rejected a collective request presented by the group Not In
Our Name (NION) to force the local Curia to delete baptism records on
request.
Raphael Vassallo
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."