Mentoring with Petr Vít 2019
APO mentoring continued in 2019. Mr. Petr Vít, lawyer specialized on NGO sector, provided individual consultations at the AIFP‘s office in Prague from April to June 2019. These consultations took altogether 22 hours and were attended by 17 patient organizations.
REPORT AND FEEDBACK OF PATIENT ORGANIZATIONS
The most frequent topics of consultations included:
- Functioning of non-profit organizations and their bodies, problem solving
- Founding of non-profit organizations and changes in legal forms
- Labor law
- Civil law (contracts)
- Copyright law
- GDPR
Feedback from the speaker:
The most frequent topic of consultations was the new regulation on the protection of personal data (GDPR) and the related issues. This topic is very important for patient organizations because, barring a few exceptions, they process sensitive personal data (particularly data about one’s health) which are subject to a stricter regulation. Together with representatives of the given organizations, we attempted to find a way of protecting personal data that would on one hand at least roughly fulfill (not always clearly) the requirements of the Regulation, and at the same time would not burden the organization with unnecessary administration.
The second big topic includes by-laws and founding contracts of non-profit organizations and the functioning of their bodies in practice. Here also we attempted to find a solution (mostly comprising of changes in by-laws and founding contracts) that would be easy and would not create an unnecessary bureaucratic burden in the organization.
Communication with representatives of the patient organizations was without any problems, but it was clear that for some of them the legal system is very complicated, which I can definitely confirm from my own experience. It is a commonplace fact that applying the law in practice is becoming more and more difficult with the increasing amount of effective legislation (a good example is the mentioned GDPR). Of course, this is twice as true for non-profit organizations, which often function on a volunteer basis and do not have much money.
