Sabic to Forward the Danas Complaint to RIK
ExpiredSabic to Forward the Danas Complaint to RIK
Belgrade - Rodoljub Sabic, Commissioner for Information of Public Importance, announced today that, accordingly to the procedure prescribed by Law, he would forward the complaint of Danas daily newspaper to the Republic Election Commission (RIK) and give it a deadline to state its position regarding the allegations in the complaint; it is only after RIK voices its position that Sabic would make his decision. “What that decision will be, I can't tell you for reasons of principle, while the formal procedure is not ended. This can, however, be conjectured from my public statements,” Sabic told Danas. The Danas newsdesk has requested RIK to submit it reports of the parties about funds spent during the election campaign. Although the legal timeframe of 15 days for replying has elapsed, RIK is yet to do it. Miodrag Petrovic, spokesman of RIK, said that they would not do it in the next 90 days, until RIK “performs the verification of the reports.”
The Republic Election Commission shall decide on tomorrow's session who to entrust the auditing of financial reports of parties and coalitions that have taken part in the elections. All parties and coalitions that have participated in the parliamentary elections have submitted their reports about election campaign funding, told the Beta Agency RIK's spokesman Miodrag Petrovic. RIK should decide whom to entrust the auditing of financial reports - the expert service of the Assembly of Serbia which employs authorized auditors, or to independent auditors. According to the Law on Financing Political Parties, RIK must verify the data from the reports within 90 days from the submission by the parties, and to hire authorized auditors. The report should be published in the Official Gazette. Sabic reminds that the Law on Free Access to Information stipulates that information of public importance is in principle available to the public at any time.
“The government authority is required to submit to the requestor this information without delay and within 15 days at the latest. The fact that a certain government body is authorized, i.e. obliged to control this information, is not relevant for the right of the public to know. That could be a reason for limited access for the public only if the disclosure of such information would endanger the realization of these authorizations,” Sabic says.
He stresses that the best way to make information of public importance accessible to the public is publishing them publicly, which would at the same time enable access to information to a unlimited circle of interested parties, instead of giving them just to certain media outlets, journalists, citizens or other entities.
“The public authority authorized to make the decision on publishing in the Official Gazette shall decide independently when it would make the publication, but it does not mean that it is not required to respond to every lawful request for access to information prior to that, in some other adequate manner”, Sabic says. He stresses that in the democratic society, the right of the public to know was the principle, while curbing that right is only a rare exception which must be founded on objective and justified reasons. Ten days ago, Transparency Serbia has, based on estimates on the presence of political parties on television and billboards, established that almost all parties, just on this basis, exceeded the legally permitted amount (67 million dinars). G17 Plus and LDP have told journalists how much money they had spent in the campaign (65,6 and around 70 million dinars respectively), but failed to explain the structure of the costs and who the donors were. The non-publication has lead to various speculation and the Chairwoman of the Anticorruption Council Verica Barac thinks that the reports are not presented to the public because parties are trying to conceal their sponsors.
