Dr. Fred Logue:

I think the Senator is talking about Article 21, which is the right to object. That is not a veto on data processing and it only applies in limited circumstances. In particular, if there is a legal obligation to process the information, there is no right to object. There is a kind of misconception that a person can object to or prevent data from being processed but that is not correct.

If the legislation says it can be given out, it can be given out. For example, as I have said many times now, I could get the Senator's birth certificate tomorrow and there is nothing she could do about it. That will tell me the name of her mother and possibly her father, their occupations, her date of birth and things like that. This idea that we have this kind of privacy or that parents can hide their identities from their children is, therefore, quite alien to our system.

The second thing is that contact is being mixed up with access to information. I have no idea where that is coming from. Adopted people want their information. Nobody is saying that, in all cases, they want this information to trace their parents. If the issue is contact or tracing, and a risk of this can be identified and demonstrated through objective studies, we can guard against this in a way that does not restrict people's data protection rights. It can be done in another way. There are lots of cases where there are issues between parents and children in which the parents may not want the children to be able to contact them. An example would be an abusive parent outside of an adoption context. However, in those circumstances, we do not say such children cannot know who their parents are. There are other laws out there to protect people from unwanted contact from other people. It does not have to be a secrecy law; it can be something else. You have to think about what the risk is and what the most proportionate way to protect against it is.