A/HRC/13/40/Add.2 Government and the Jewish Community pursuant to articles 66 to 69 of the 2000 Law on Denationalization. 14. According to article 319 of the Criminal Code, a person who by force, maltreatment, threatening the safety, derision of the national, ethnic or religious symbols, by desecrating monuments, graves or in any other manner that causes or incites to national, racial or religious hatred, discord and intolerance, is punishable with imprisonment of one to five years.4 Anybody who commits this crime by misusing his position or if riots, violence or large property damage were caused, may be punished with imprisonment of one to 10 years. The prevention of incitement to national, racial or religious hatred and intolerance falls within the mandate of the Ministry of the Interior. The Government informed the Special Rapporteur that the Criminal Code was amended in September 2009. According to the new article 394 (d), a person who publicly spreads racist or xenophobic written material or other representations of an idea or theory which facilitates, promotes or encourages hatred, discrimination or violence, against any other person or groups on the grounds of race, colour, national or ethnic origin and religious conviction, shall be punished with imprisonment of one to five years. Article 39, paragraph 5, of the amended Criminal Code requires the court to take into consideration, when meting out the sentence, whether the crime has been perpetrated against a person or against a group of persons or property, directly or indirectly, on the grounds of national and social origin, political and religious convictions, social status, gender, race or colour. 15. The 2005 Law on Personal Data Protection prohibits the processing of personal data revealing the religious, philosophical or other beliefs, unless the processing is carried out in the framework of the activities of institutions, associations or any non-profit organizations for political, philosophical, religious, trade union or other purposes, if data processing refers exclusively to their members and such data are not disclosed to third parties without the consent of the data subject. In addition, article 67 of the 2006 Law on Police provides that personal data that are exclusively related to religious belief may not be collected by the police unless exceptionally necessary for a specific investigation. 16. The 2007 Public Holidays Act provides that the religious festivals of Orthodox Christmas and Easter as well as the Islamic Ramazan Bayram shall be public holidays for all citizens of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and that a number of other religious festivals5 are holidays for a particular group of believers only. Similarly, the previous law on public holidays, dating back to 1998, stipulated that Ramazan Bayram and Kurban Bayram were holidays only for citizens of the Muslim faith. In a related judgement, the European Court of Human Rights emphasized that “while the notion of the State sitting in judgement on the state of a citizen’s inner and personal beliefs is abhorrent and may smack unhappily of past infamous persecutions, the Court observes that this is a case where the applicant sought to enjoy a special right bestowed by Macedonian law which provided that Muslims could take holiday on particular days”.6 Since the applicant in the case of Kosteski v. the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia was not prepared to produce any evidence that could substantiate his claim to be a Muslim, the European Court of Human Rights concluded unanimously that there had been no violation of articles 9 and 14 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. 4 5 6 See also below the chapter on incitement to religious hatred, paras. 46-48. The additional religious holidays are stipulated in article 2 of the 2007 Public Holidays Act, indicating the religious festivals for Macedonian Orthodox Christians (five additional holidays), Muslims (one), Jews (one) and Catholics (three). See judgement of the European Court of Human Rights of 13 April 2006, Kosteski v. the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, application no. 55170/00, para. 39. 7