Commissioner for Information of Public Importance Rodoljub Šabić said that score and ranking of our country on this year's Global Corruption Perception Index were worrying and that they mean that much will have to be reconsidered within the concept on which anti-corruption efforts were based. In this context, the Commissioner particularly emphasized the following:

“I recently publicly predicted this score. I have to say I am not pleased in the least to see my prediction proven true. It certainly is a problem that we scored 3.4 on a scale from 1 to 10, which is far below5.0 as the first passing mark, and that we are tied for 85-92 with Montenegro, Albania, Senegal, Panama and India - all of them constantly considered as countries with extremely high corruption levels.

We are used to bad scores and bad ranking because we never actually “shined” on CPI. Since our country has been observed and scored, all the scores we received after 2000 were, as I have said before, very unsatisfactory. We started as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia with an alarmingly low, literally catastrophic score 1.3 we inherited from Milošević. We were later improving and moving up from that score, reserved almost exclusively for African and South American dictatorships. The score changed from 2.4, 2.7, 2.8, 3.0 to the last year's 3.4, which is the best score we received so far, but it remains a bad score.

This is why I believe the largest problem here is that we have repeated the last year's score. The score is not worse, but neither is it better than last year, not even by one per mile. There was no improvement and this cannot be ignored. If something was valuable and encouraging in this succession of bad scores, it was the fact that we managed to improve - only just - those scores from year to year. The improvement was very slow, but evident. We were moving forward, albeit at a snail's pace. This year's score shows that this advancement has stopped. It is a very serious warning and more than a good reason to reconsider the “concept” on which the fight against corruption in our country is based.

A large gap between what is proclaimed and normative and what happens in real life is evident. Adoption of anti-corruption instruments, laws, strategies, plans, ratifications of international conventions and membership in international associations are important, but they alone cannot yield results. Those results must be achieved in real life through actions of relevant institutions and consequent achievement of adequate principles. And virtually all anti-corruption institutions operate in inadequate conditions and some of them, such as the Public Procurement Administration and the State Audit Institution operate in literally catastrophic conditions. The Government and the executive authorities cannot afford to ignore this problem any longer. As regards e.g. the principle of transparency, freedom of information, accountability of the government, which evidently facing strong resistance, the Government cannot delay any longer the activation of mechanisms to break that resistance. I am convinced that an anti-corruption concept which is not based on the realm of reality must be changed as a matter of utmost urgency. If we do not change it, our score could be even worse next year.”