The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection, Rodoljub Sabic has met today with Michael Davenport, Ambassador of United Kingdom in Belgrade and talked with him about the cooperation so far and in the future.
Evaluating support of the Embassy of Great Britain to the Commissioner's institution as very important and friendly, the Commissioner stressed that today's meeting, one in a series of friendly contacts, had for its direct motive start of implementation of one really interesting project - compilation of the model Law on Protecting Whistleblowers (insiders, whistleblowers).
In relation to that, the Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic also stated as follows:
„Whistleblowers' protection is no doubt, one of the most important presumptions for implementing results in fight against corruption.
I'll remind that about two years ago Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has stressed the importance of this issue and adopted the Resolution on Whistleblowers' Protection, inviting all member countries to reassess their relevant regulations and to secure adequate status and protection of the people who, in order to protect public interest and oppose criminal, corruption, violation of human rights and due to similar activities, have come into clash with formal or informal rules about "secrets", and have therefore suffered completely undeserved, unpleasant consequences.
We in Serbia, of course, even without the Resolution have more than enough of reasons to deal with this issue in an adequate way. On one hand, for a long time already, necessary results are lacking in fight against corruption, and on the other hand the practice shows that whistleblowers, almost as a rule, fare very badly. But, although the Commissioner and Ombudsman insisted on that, giving even adequate specific proposals, and although the media and the public have often opened up that issue, the state still didn't undertake practically anything on normative level, in order to improve the legal status of the whistleblowers.
With very significant material assistance of the Great Britain Embassy and also of the Embassy of Netherlands, the Commissioner shall be enabled to implement a project in the next year, which could more significantly contribute to improving the situation in that field. Project implementation means engaging relevant domestic and foreign experts, serious analysis of international and comparative-law solutions, organizing international experts' meeting and as a final result, compilation of quality model of the Law on Protection of Whistleblowers. After the expert public discussion this Law shall be offered to our Government and the Assembly for adoption."
