News scritte da Serra Beatrice

The issue of the protection of personal data of religious nature possesses at least three characteristics: it is topical, fundamental, and complex.
The issue of personal data protection, especially when read in the prism of the interactions between the state order and the confessional order, belongs to the present time for two reasons.
Firstly, and immediately, because the whole matter has been rearranged by EU Regulation 2016/679 (henceforth GDPR or European Regulation) concerning the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and to the free movement of such data. The Regulation, repealing Directive 95/46/EC, became definitively and directly applicable in the member states of the European Union on 25 May 2018[1].
It is therefore a question of a new discipline which, as such, needs careful hermeneutical scrutiny.
Secondly, the topicality of the subject emerges, indirectly,from the fact that the problem of the meaning of legal categories similar or overlapping with that of data protection,such as secrecy and confidentiality, recur recently in relations between Church and States. I refer to state attempts to ignore the ecclesial discipline of the confessional seal and ministerial secrecy to prevent or repress sexual abuse of minors, as well as to requests for access to confidential canonical documents presented by civil judges to confessional authorities[2].
There is, therefore, an objective need to define the inter-ordinal declinations of figures that share a direct or indirect affiliation to the semantic area of confidentiality.
This appears even more evident or understandable if we look at the second characteristic of the data protection theme: fundamentality.
To tell the truth, in the legal system of the European Union the protection of personal data is the object of a right. Right established, respectively, by art. 8 of the Charter of Nice, by art. 16 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and by art. 1 of the GDPR which, in addition to reaffirming the right of every person to the protection of personal data concerning him or her, explicitly qualifies this right as fundamental[3].
This gives rise to two logical corollaries: the undisputed obligation for the Member States of the Union to guarantee individuals the protection of their personal data; the need to achieve this protection in a proportional manner, i.e. reconciling the data protection with other equally fundamental rights- including the right to religious freedom- as moreover sanctioned by the GDPR itself in the "Recital" no. 4[4].
Again, the subject of personal data, especially when related to the religious phenomenon, is structurally complex and not easy to interpret and apply. And this, first, because its juridical structure derives from a multiplicity of sources: European law, national laws, confessional rules and, therefore, from the peculiar power relations amongthese sources and from their evolution.
Now, having set these very general coordinates, this contribution intends to define the subject of data protection from a specific perspective, looking at the Italian experience with particular reference to the action of the Catholic Church and the declination of data protection within the peculiar dynamics of coexistence between canonical and state regulations.
The aim is to offer a reconstructive framework from which to draw elements of reflection for a partial evaluation of the GDPR six years after its definitive and direct applicability in the countries of the European Union.