A Personal Data Protection Law has been published
April 4, 2019
On March 29, 2019 was published in the Official Gazette No. 28743-A the Law 81 of March 26, 2019, of Personal Data Protection.
This Law, presented at the National Congress on August 20, 2018, aims to establish the principles, rights, obligations and procedures governing the protection of personal data, including the processing, storage, use and transfer of personal data. It Is Important to note that “personal data” for the purposes of the Law in question refers to “Any information concerning natural persons, identifying or making them identifiable. “
Exceptions from the scope of this Law are those treatments of data that are expressly regulated by special laws or by the regulations that develop them, in addition to the treatments that:
- Are made by a natural person for exclusively natural or domestic activities.
- Those carried out by competent authorities for the purpose of prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offenses or execution of criminal sanctions.
- Those that are made for the analysis of financial intelligence and related to national security in accordance with the laws, treaties or international agreements that regulate these matters.
- When dealing with data related to international organizations, in compliance with treaties and agreements ratified by Panama.
- The results of information obtained through a prior dissociation or anonymization procedure.
The National Authority of Transparency and Access to Information (ANTAI) will be the regulator in this matter, who, among other functions, will supervise the processing of personal data contained in databases, regulate the database and determine the inaccuracy of a personal data, address complaints and carry out administrative investigations and verifications related to the rights established in the Law and will execute the corresponding sanctions.
In the same way, the “Council of Protection of Personal Data” is created as a consultative entity in matter that regulates the present Law, which will be formed by several institutions related to this matter.
The general administrator of the National Authority for Government Innovation (AIG) will serve as technical advisor and will attend the meetings only with the right to voice.
This Law can be found at the following link: https://www.gacetaoficial.gob.pa/pdfTemp/28743_A/72148.pdf