The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection made a repeated inspection of compliance with the legal duty to publish information booklets by higher education institutions.
The Commissioner said the warnings and rulings with relevant orders he had sent to about 200 higher education institutions several months ago resulted in the improvement of their attitude towards compliance with the legal duty, but much remained to be done before compliance with this duty could be seen as satisfactory.
In that regard, Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic also said the following:
"Publishing of information booklets on official electronic presentations with appropriate and regularly updated content is a duty set out by the Law which is specified in detail in the Instructions for Preparation and Publishing of Information Booklet passed by the Commissioner for Information on the basis of the Law. According to the law, the duty includes both public and private higher education institutions.
The inspection we carried out this spring showed the situation in terms of compliance with this duty was literally disastrous. A mere 5% of higher education institutions published their information booklets, i.e. a dozen of them, and almost all of them published information booklets upon the Commissioner's intervention following petitions received by journalists, citizens and students. This was the reason I sent warnings, and after that relevant orders, to 200 higher education institutions.
The repeated inspection we just carried out showed the situation is significantly different. Of 135 public higher education institutions where inspection was carried out, 106 published their information booklets. Of 67 private higher education institutions, 36 published information booklets. Out of the total of 202 inspected higher education institutions, 142 published their information booklets, which accounts for 71%, and this percentage is several times higher than the percentage found during the inspection carried out in spring.
This is certainly a praiseworthy result, but nevertheless I would like to emphasise that we are still pretty far from a situation that could be termed as satisfactory. However, 29% of higher education institutions have still not published their information booklets. And even those that have need to put more emphasis on quality and content rather than quantity. Also, a significant number of information booklets does not contain or only partially contain certain information they must contain, particularly information of high public interest such as budgets, public procurements, salaries and work assets.
These shortcomings must be eliminated. I will continue to insist on that in the following period, and also on responsibility of those that failed to comply with the duty."
