The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection has assessed as very indicative and from the perspective of the relationship of the authorities towards the rights of the citizens worrying, the extremely big increase in the number of cases upon which he takes action.

Pointing to the fact that only in the past month the Commissioner’s Office registered 530 new cases, the Commissioner has warned that nothing, not even the forthcoming pre-election atmosphere cannot and must not justify the problems in exercising the citizens’ rights guaranteed by the Constitution and law.Concerning this, the Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic has also said:

"It is very indicative and worrying that generally large and ever-growing influx of complaints of the citizens has literally been rising dramatically lately. You do not need a better illustration than the data from November 2011 when 530 new cases were registered during this month only, while for example, during the entire 2005 there were 437 cases.

The institution of the Commissioner is literally cluttered by the citizens' complaints, but bearing in mind the fact that it is chronically under-staffed far below the projected number, the Institution objectively cannot act within the legal deadlines, and therefore the citizens, journalists, media and other complainants have to wait for the Commissioner’s decisions longer than it was needed.

What is particularly worrying is that the significant number of appeals are filed because of the denial of the information to which the public, quite obviously, with no doubt has the right. It is unbelievable that even seven years after we got the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance, many authorities make certain data unavailable and treat it as some kind of secret, even those information that, without any problem, ought to be available to the wide public and even to be visibly presented on the Internet sites of the authorities, i.e. the budget data, expenses, payroll, public procurements and so on.

The number of citizens’ complaints concerning the Law on Personal Data Protection is also growing. Lately, many citizens have been rightly irritated by the obvious possibility that some political activists can access their personal data easily and use them for different purposes, some people recognize it as making the lists of the (dis)obedient, that is why I have publicly called on all the responsible and particularly political parties to refrain from any actions which represent the violation of privacy and laws.

The increased number of the citizen’s complaints based on both these laws undoubtedly testifies that the relationship of the authorities towards the citizens’ rights is worse. Obviously the forthcoming pre-election atmosphere is probably, to a large extent, the explanation for this. But certainly it is not and should not be any justification. "