Source: "Blic"
Debate on Secrets heating up
M. Males
The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance denied yesterday in a statement given to "Blic" daily the statements given to our paper by Mr. Vladimir Cvijan, President of the task force for preparation of the Bill on Data Confidentiality, who claims that "the Ombudsman and the Commissioner will have access to every confidential information from their inspection powers". Mr. Sabic said it was really unbelievable to say something like that and to be silent on the fact that Article 40 of the Law envisaged those powers could be denied to them exactly by services which should be controlled.Mr. Sabic said that Mr. Cvijan "probably counts on lack of information to the public" when he states other arguments in favour of this Law. According to Mr. Sabic, a public debate on the Bill which has not been opened yet should have been held before the Bill was submitted to the Assembly and not after that, as Mr. Cvijan claims. Mr. Sabic also claims that Mr. Cvijan did not propose a public debate to him, to the Ombudsman or to Mr. Dejan Milankovic, who resigned from his membership in the task force.
In connection with Mr. Cvijan's claim that more than 80 percent of the said Law was taken exactly from the Bill which Mr. Sabic wrote two years ago with a group of experts, the Commissioner said that "by Mr. Cvijan's logic, the music of Serbian folk singer Mitar Miric is 80 percent similar to that of the "Rolling Stones", because it uses a limited number of vocals, notes and instruments".
- In our case, the remaining 20 percent of difference can in no way stand. The previous Bill was based on the principle of real control of implementation of the Law and the current is based on the "principle" that creators of secrets "control" themselves. According to the current Bill, implementation of the Law will be controlled by some kind of Government's "service", which is a complete nonsense. The rudiments in organization of the Government are that no expert service has or can have inspection powers and without such powers, all talk of inspection and control is pointless" - Mr. Sabic concluded.
"Above all, it is unacceptable - theoretically unjustifiable and practically ungrounded - to express distrust of two independent public authorities in the text of a law, all the more so because they were elected at the National Assembly with the majority of votes of all deputies and their personal rights are restricted or suspended under the Constitution", Mr. Sasa Jankovic, Ombudsman, said.
- From the aspect of human rights protection - the draft text does not leave scope for independent control of regularity of actions taken by executive authorities in situations when fundamental human rights are restricted and suspended by definition. From the aspect of national security, public order, prosecution of perpetrators of criminal offences and other similar considerations that have presumably motivated the authors of the Draft Law to restrict the powers of the Ombudsman and the Commissioner, the envisaged restrictions will actually have exactly the opposite effect: neither the Ombudsman nor the Commissioner have no means of knowing whether a body the legality or regularity of whose operations is challenged by a citizen will invoke one of the reasons for restricting the powers of these two controlling bodies - he concluded.
