On November 1, 2021, an amendment to Act No. 18/2018 Coll. on Protection of Personal Data, as amended, came into force.

The amendment has excluded the applicability of the Personal Data Protection Act to processing of personal data of deceased persons, which are processed for scientific, statistical or artistic purposes, for the purposes of press releases, radio and television broadcasting, archiving, documentary activities, historical research, cemetery activities, placement of memorials and commemorative plaques, holding remembrance events and commemorations, to the extent necessary for their fulfillment.

According to the explanatory memorandum, the purpose of the amendment was to remove barriers to building important commemorative memorials, especially victims of Nazism, victims of the struggle for democracy in Slovakia, victims of the Holocaust, crimes against humanity or genocide, and at the same time barriers to operating virtual cemeteries, maintaining private archives, keeping war crimes documentation, or organizing events to commemorate war crimes. In accordance with the former wording of the law, these barriers entailed in the requirement to obtain the consent of a close person, while the explicit disagreement of even one close person made it impossible to process the personal data of the deceased person for the above-mentioned purposes.