Managing partner and head of the media law practice of Jurimex, Yuriy Kraynyak, believes that restricting military personnel’s access to gambling does not contradict basic human rights and can be implemented by law.
Managing partner and head of the media law practice of Jurimex, Yuriy Kraynyak, believes that restricting military personnel’s access to gambling does not contradict basic human rights and can be implemented by law.
«The right to place a bet in a game of chance does not belong to the basic, natural human rights. Therefore, there is no problem in regulating it,» he explains. Moreover, the lawyer says, during martial law, the state can restrict a number of rights for reasons of national security — and this is also not a legal problem.
However, according to Krayniak, the key issue is not the ban itself, but how exactly it will be implemented in practice.
It’s primarily about data. In a normal situation, an online casino sees a hypothetical «Vasyl Vasylchenko» and has no reliable confirmation of who he really is. But if integration with military conscription registers is used to restrict access, the situation changes dramatically, the specialist explains.
In this case, according to the lawyer, the service already knows for sure that it is a serviceman of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. And this, according to Krayniak, is another level of data sensitivity.
«If some online casino accumulates information about servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, how will the state control the preservation of this base?» — notes Kraynyak.
He suggests that technically it could look like a separate closed register that the casino would access before each bet.
«As far as I can assume, there will be some kind of closed register that the casino will refer to each time before accepting a bet. There will be an established exchange of information, and even the very fact that a person is a „gambling addict or a military man“ will be enough to form a casino base,» the lawyer explains.
And this is where the subtle point comes in: even a minimal sign — without details — already creates a new category of sensitive data.
In fact, we are not only talking about the personal data of a specific person, but also about information that concerns the state during the war. In the array, such data can allow indirect conclusions to be drawn — for example, about the movement of military personnel or their concentration in certain regions. Therefore, Krayniak concludes, the very idea of the restriction is legally permissible, but its implementation must be extremely careful — so as not to create new risks where there were none before.
As a reminder, the Government intends to limit the participation of military personnel in gambling for the period of martial law, while extending the ban to both stationary gambling establishments and online casinos.
