by Festus 6 Replies latest watchtower scandals
It only took 23 years but on 9th of May 2023 ECHR came to conclusion that forbidding the "namelists" was not an action against religious freedom.
ECHR's judgments are binding in all EU states.
JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES v. FINLAND (coe.int)
The news made headlines in Finland as well.
Thx Festus for the info. No one on the court dissented.
What a pointless and trivial case to take all the way to the Court of Human Rights!
Indeed. Especially if you take into account that the JW "PR-clerk" at the time, Veikko Leinonen described these notes more or less futile.
However if you take into account that these notes fall under the GDPR umbrella (which regulates more or less everything what comes use of private info/what is private info in EU countries) it might be bit bigger issue.
it might be bit bigger issue.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance Guidelines
GDPR came along in 2016 and became enforceable in 2018. So it has been a while now, but the OP's '23 years' must be a typo.
GDPR has only been around for a few years, but other data protection legislation in various countries has been around since the late 1990s, for example, here in the UK we had the Data Protection Act 1998.
Apparently, Finland had the Personal Data Act since 1999 (prior to GDPR), and presumably it was under this that their Data Protection Ombudsman first ruled the JWs should not be collecting door-to-door info without the knowledge and consent of the householder.
Point 5 of The Facts section in the latest ruling says: "In October 2000 the Data Protection Ombudsman (tietosuojavaltuutettu, dataombudsmannen – “the Ombudsman”) issued an opinion (89Û/45/97) about the applicant community’s data collection practices indicating, inter alia, that personal data could be collected in the course of door-to-door preaching by individual Jehovah’s Witnesses only with the consent of data subjects."
So yes, it seems the org's lawyers have dragged this on for 23 years!
In Europe at least, those S8 house-to-house records are well and truly dead. If there are any EU countries where branches have not yet withdrawn them and stopped the congregations taking their own records, they will presumably have to do that now.
@ dropoffyourkeylee
23 years is not a typo.
First page THE FACTS, number 5. " In October 2000 the Data Protection Ombudsman (tietosuojavaltuutettu, dataombudsmannen – “the Ombudsman”) issued an opinion (89Û/45/97) about the applicant community’s data collection practices.."
..and lookslike Joyrneyman already covered it...
