Edita Stejskalová: Mayor Petra Quittová publicized a family's ethnicity without their permission, a serious breach of the law
During a public session of the local assembly in the municipal department of Brno–Černovice on 11 March 2024, Mayor Petra Quittová (Mayors and Independents - STAN), who is also a member of the Czech lower house, publicized the ethnicity of a local family in response to a question posed by a local resident. A recording of the session was published on YouTube and on the website called dnesnibrno.cz ("Brno Today").
The recording was then naturally shared through social media outlets such as Facebook. There was a stormy discussion about this family online, for example, on news server Romea.cz.
Quittová’s response to the local resident’s question should have been undertaken so as to meet all of the requirements of the law protecting people’s right to privacy as well as their right to never be subjected to discrimination, social exclusion and stigmatization on the basis of a characteristic protected by legislation. Those who then commented on the issue in their online posts just confirmed the stereotypes they hold about Roma.
Essentially, those commenting concluded that Romani people have no right to privacy, and they approved of Quittová’s behavior. They claimed that she was “calling things by their real names” and was just telling “the truth”.
In this case, the fact that this politician had likely broken the law and violated both the civil rights and the fundamental human rights of the family in question was not even considered essential. Some of the other online commentators intuitively sensed that “something isn’t right there”.
All of the above is the reason I decided to get involved in this matter. I filed a motion with the Office for Personal Data Protection for them to investigate.
Together with Dana Hrušková (a social worker), Gwendolyn Albert (an independent activist), David Beňák (a college instructor) and Michal Miko (the director of RomanoNet) we contacted Czech Interior Minister Vít Rakušan, who chairs the STAN party. We were looking for the objective truth – did Mayor Petra Quittová, who is also a lawmaker in the lower house, violate the law on the protection of personal information on 11 March 2024?
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Is a breach of the law on personal information a disproportionate violation of a citizen’s constitutional rights? We were looking for the objective truth, unencumbered by either racial prejudice or naiveté, that these Romani people had been the victims of wrongdoing.
It would be difficult for us to be accused of “siding” with the Roma if we sought an answer to this question from experts and representatives of the public administration, i.e., from the Office for Personal Data Protection.
Warning: Publicizing somebody’s ethnicity is a serious violation of the law on the protection of personal information!
The only significant conclusion here is that the publication of any citizen’s ethnicity does constitute a serious violation of Act No. 110/2019 Coll., “on the protection of personal data”, which protects sensitive information such as ethnicity from unauthorized publication (the law exhaustively states which categories have the status of special protection, e.g., health status, sexual orientation, political and philosophical beliefs or membership in interest groups). It is especially grave if a public figure or member of the public administration breaks the law on the protection of personal information.
A consequence of publicizing data about somebody’s ethnicity may be that they are discriminated against or socially stigmatized, which is a serious violation of their fundamental rights and freedoms. In the case of an ethnic minority, this is about protecting the individual from the risk of hatefully-motivated attacks and harassment.
Mayor Quittová, who is also a lawmaker in the lower house, violated these legal regulations and thereby undermined the public trust in the ability of authorities to protect citizens’ sensitive information when, during that local assembly session, she publicly shared the ethnicity of a family living in Brno. Roughly one month after the publishing of the recording from the local assembly on YouTube, approximately 130 visitors had watched it and others had shared it.
Excerpt from the notification of the personal data controller’s comments and the result of its assessment of the complaint
It follows from the personal data manager’s statement that, based on the notice from the Office for Personal Data Protection, he removed the video at issue from the website of the Brno-Černovice Municipal Department and from the YouTube channel, and further that he will ensure that the anonymization of the entire disputed part of the video of the council meeting in question; the personal data manager explained the circumstances of the data’s publication, namely, that in the given case, the person responsible for anonymization made an incorrect assessment of the scope of the published information. As part of the personal data manager’s powers with regard to personnel, the person responsible has been instructed on the necessity of performing anonymization not just in relation to generally-known types of personal data, but to also perform it in the context of assessing the entire situation, especially when special categories of personal data may be involved. The relevant person was then instructed through an internal instruction to perform anonymization in accordance with those instructions.
In the given matter, the Office for Personal Data Protection used its supervisory authority in accordance with Article 58 paragraph 1 letters a) and d) of Regulation 2016/679 of the European Parliament and the Council of the EU of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons in connection with the processing of personal data, and on the free movement of such data, and on the repeal of Directive 95/46/EC (General Regulation on the Protection of Personal Data data protection, “GDPR”). With regard to the statement provided by the personal data manager and the measures taken by him, in accordance with Article 57 paragraph 1 letter f) of this regulation, I inform you that the Office for Personal Data Protection does not currently find any reason to take any further action against the personal data manager of the Brno-Černovice Municipal District.
The recording was publicly available in its un-anonymized form for at least three months from the date of its release, as is indicated by the higher number of persons who have watched it since. As I mentioned above, I contacted the Office for Personal Data Protection and I also repeatedly contacted Czech Interior Minister Vít Rakušan, chair of the STAN party, with our requests regarding this issue.
In our request, we called on the minister to express his view of this issue and to inform us of any active legal or political steps which he intends to take regarding this matter. While the Office for Personal Data Protection has addressed this situation, Rakušan has not answered since we contacted him in April and apparently never will.
I am hereby publishing the full wording of our requests, which were sent to the Interior Ministry on 19 April and 24 April 2024, as well as our motion to the Office for Personal Data Protection and the outcome of its investigation. In the notification sent to me by the Office for Personal Data Protection in July 2024, the answer from the manager of personal data for the Brno–Černovice Municipal Department is cited, in which he gives his own ignorance of the law as the reason why the Personal Data Act was breached.
The manager gave this as an excuse even though the law explicitly formulates the obligations of those responsible for handling such data. As I stated above, the law establishes categories of personal data requiring special protection in order to prevent citizens from being discriminated against and stigmatized.
The irony of this situation is that the manager whose job it is to work with personal data every day used his ignorance of the relevant law when defending his actions. Let us now focus on the findings of the investigation conducted by the Office for Personal Data Protection, which I will mention here on a very basic level.
That authority’s conclusions are neither naive nor racist. They are its unequivocal interpretation resulting from the application of the relevant law and the legal regulations related to it.
I am publishing the notice from this monitoring authority in full here and I am convinced that it is unequivocally impossible to ignore the truth of this specific case. Based on this inquiry, the audio passage has since been anonymized (by inserting a beeping sound) with an explicit reference to the Personal Data Protection Act.
The authority’s conclusions can be briefly summarized as follows:
- Data on ethnicity falls under special protection per the Act on the Protection of Personal Data.
- Mayor Petra Quittová (STAN), who is also a member of the lower house, unequivocally violated the law by publicly stating the ethnicity of the family at issue.
- The manager of personal data for the Brno – Černovice Municipal Department violated the law when he failed to anonymize the part of the recording where Quittová expressed her views of the family at issue in detail. He published the full recording of the session in a format that violated the law.
- Anybody can file a lawsuit in civil court for compensation for the harm caused when somebody publishes sensitive data deserving of special protection and harms that person’s personality rights.
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Petra Quittová was criticized for her anti-Romani remarks but refused to resign over them and, paradoxically, was then supported by a member of the Romani family at issue
The Mayor of Brno-Černovice, Petra Quittová, who is also a lawmaker in the lower house, was criticized for the anti-Romani remarks she made during an open, public session of the local assembly. Her comments sparked a wave of resentment not just from Romani community members, but from the broader public.
Brno’s Roma Council responded with sharp criticism and called on Quittová to resign, arguing that her remarks could disrupt the fragile coexistence between the non-Romani and Romani communities and damage public trust in public officials. Quittová apologized but claimed that her words had been “taken out of context”.
Despite being the target of such strong criticism, Quittová decided to stay in office. Surprisingly, a member of the Romani family whom she had discussed in her statement supported her doing so.
The family member said he had not been insulted by what the mayor said and expressed solidarity with her. She has remained in office.
