The Information and Data Protection Commissioner, Mr. Besnik Dervishi, was invited to the meeting “Elections 2025: the role of the media in the electoral process, challenges and opportunities”. This technical roundtable was co-organized by the Central Election Commission (CEC) and the Presence of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which focused on the preparatory process for next year’s elections for the Assembly of the Republic of Albania.
The Commissioner participated in the second session of this activity with the topic “Main findings and recommendations from state institutions and other actors”. In his speech, Mr. Dervishi, among other things, emphasized that despite the fact that the Commissioner’s Office does not have specific tasks regarding electoral processes, for both areas of the institution’s role it has a very important experience of cooperation with the CEC.
“According to the legislation on the right to information, CEC is a ‘public authority’ – very important in the context of its role in electoral processes. On the other hand, in the field of data protection, in the capacity of ‘controller’ it processes a very large amount of citizens’ personal data. As you know, the legislation on the right to information provides for the instrument of the ‘Transparency Program’. We must strengthen efforts to ensure that this instrument precedes information for the citizen, first and foremost, and of course, for the media as well. In this way, we further improve the functioning of the concept of transparency. We have adopted, together with the Council of Europe and the European Data Protection Board, a Guide that we presented with CEC before the last local elections. This is a very important document, for political parties in the first place, but also for all of us who contribute during the electoral process. There is a fundamental aspect that political parties must respect, the principle of ‘data minimization’, this is where the establishment of the data protection barrier and the prevention of its misuse begins. These are somewhat new concepts, but we have begun to promote them and have been demanding them with determination.”
The technical roundtable is an effort to increase the integrity of the upcoming elections, as well as to strengthen the implementation of legal provisions and rules in their professional and impartial coverage.
