Dr Nataša Pirc Musar
Nataša Pirc Musar was born in 1968 in Ljubljana. After graduating from the Faculty of Law of the University of Ljubljana in 1992, she passed the national bar examination in 1997. After completing her studies, she was employed for six years at the Slovenian national television station as a journalist and newspresenter for the main news programme TV Dnevnik. Subsequently, she worked for five years as a news presenter on “24 ur”, the primary information programme of the largest commercial television broadcaster in Slovenia, POP TV.
She gained additional experience in journalismat CNN and studied at the Media Department of Salford University in Manchester in the UK fortwo semesters. During her studies she did professional internships at BBC, Granada TV, SkyNews, Reuters TV, and Border TV. She has also written newspaper articles and worked on radio.
Striving for new knowledge, in 2001 she moved to the financial sector, where she joined the largest Slovenian private financial corporation, Aktiva Group, as Head of Corporate Communications. In April 2003 she became the Director of the Training and Communications Centre of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Slovenia. On July 15 2004, the National Assembly elected her the second Slovenian Commissioner for Access to Public Information. She was nominated for this position by the President ofthe Republic of Slovenia. Since 31 December2005, when the Office of the Commissioner for Access to Public Information merged with the Inspectorate for Personal Data Protection, Nataša Pirc Musar has held the office of Information Commissioner.
Upon the proposal of the President of the Republic Dr. Danilo Türk, on May 21 2009 the National Assembly elected Mrs. Pirc Musar to an additional five-year term as Information Commissioner. She began her new term of officeon July 16 2009 and finished it on July 2014.
In October 2009, Nataša Pirc Musar was elected Vice President of the Europol Joint Supervisory Body, and in March 2013 President of the JSB Europol. Members of this supervisory authority are representatives of national supervisory authorities for the protection of personal data from all Europol member states; i.e. the EU Member States. In accordance with the Europol Convention, the mission of the joint supervisory authority is to conduct independent reviews ofthe activities of Europol in order to ensure that individual rights are not violated by the storage, processing, and use of data held by Europol. The joint supervisory authority monitors the permissibility of the further transfer of data originating from Europol.
On 9 December 2014 she took an oath as attorney at law at the Slovenian Bar Association. From the 1 January 2015 until December 2022 Nataša Pirc Musar was the director and owner of the Law Firm Pirc Musar & Partners.
In November 2015 she successfully defended her PhD thesis at Law Faculty of Vienna University, Austria titled How to strike the right balance between access to public information and personal data protection – using a publicinterest test.
From 2015 until 2019 she was a member of a juryat Journalism Fund in Brusseles evaluating grant proposals for journalistic investigative stories.
From 2021 until December 2022 Nataša was a member of the Executive Board of Slovenian Bar Association.
On December 23, she began to perform the duties of the President of the Republic of Slovenia.
