Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection has warned today that harmful practice continues, that certain authorities in power and public, that is, state owned companies try to evade, or to postpone execution of the orders from the Commissioner for Information's decisions, (although they are obligatory according to the law, final and executable) by submitting unauthorized complaints to Administrative Court.
Evaluating such practice as harmful both for the interests and rights of the citizens, but also for the reputation of state authorities and companies practicing it, the Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic stated in addition:
“Laymen can be allowed not to know, but even the law students must know that such a complaint (complaint by the first degree authority against the secondary’s decision) is not permitted. As well as they must know that even in the situations permitting the complaint, it by itself can not postpone execution of the decision. It is really hard to believe that such, student level of knowledge does not exist in the authorities in power and in state companies.
Still more worrisome is that out of total of 150 complaints submitted against the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance almost half, 65 make unauthorized claims of the authorities in power or of state companies. Supreme and since January 1, last year, according to the new judiciary organization, the Administrative Court have until now decided upon 57 such complaints (the others are still pending) with the identical outcome. All complaints have been, of course, dismissed as unauthorized. However, even after that, in repeated, practically identical situations some have re-submitted the unauthorized claims. Recently one court has done exactly that.
Therefore, although the number of such complaints in relation to the total number of cases of the Commissioner is very small, it must be beyond dispute that the situation in which the state authorities and companies are consciously ignoring their obligations and using unauthorized means, wrapped in transparent "legal" wafer, in order to trick rights of citizens and taxpayers guaranteed by the Constitution, burdening the taxpayers, must not be tolerated. This can certainly not be resolved only by the Commissioner, by stating relatively modest punishments which (since recently) he has at his disposal. It is time that all the responsible actors, including the Government, the National Assembly and High Judiciary Council, pay certain attention to it. “
