The decision follows an investigation by the Office for Personal Data Protection into the legality of collecting and storing blood samples of newborns, which has been common practice in four Czech hospitals since the 1980s.

The inspection was carried out after a complaint by NGO Iuridicum Remedium (IuRe) in 2013. It drew attention to the lack of legal basis for collecting the biological material of virtually all citizens of the Czech Republic born in the last 30 years.

This complaint was followed by an individual complaint in 2014, after IuRe ensured legal representative for a complainant who sought the destruction of blood samples taken from her daughters.

Partial victory

Jan Vobořil, a lawyer and executive director at IuRe, said that the decision to destroy some 3 million blood samples was the result of their long-term campaign, which drew attention to an overlooked yet extremely important issue.

Still, he said it was only a partial victory: "The Office for Personal Data Protection considers the samples a part of the medical records and by present law it accepts their storage period of 5 years. We do not consider this interpretation to be correct, and the disposal, in our opinion, should be applied to all samples already analyzed.”