The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection called on the Minister of Economy to repeal and bring in compliance with the law certain provisions of the recently passed Bylaw on the Manner of Keeping and the Content of the Register of Public Contracts.

The Commissioner expects, encouraged by the recent meeting with Minister Radulovic, in which the two parties reached a high level of consensus on the need for and importance of full, maximum transparency of all activities that involve management of public money and resources, that the Ministry will bring the said Bylaw in compliance with the law without delay.

Emphasising that paragraphs 2 and 3 of Article 11 of the Bylaw, which should provide for optimum transparency in private dealings between public and private sectors and in concessions, constitute an attempt to regulate a subject matter which the Constitution states can be regulated only by a law, and indeed to do so contrary to the law, Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic said:

"The Bylaw makes the exercise of the right to access information contained in the Register conditional upon the requester demonstrating a "legitimate interest", which is in direct contravention of the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance. The Law introduced a legal assumption of the public's justified interest to know and therefore a requester has no obligation to demonstrate any specific interest.

The Bylaw stipulates that, for the purpose of protecting the "interests of contractual parties", the public's right to know can exceptionally be curtailed, in violation of the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance, which clearly states the admissible reasons for possible restrictions of freedom of information. None of those reasons provided for in the Law imply that access can be denied by automatism; instead, the Law requires the so-called public interest test to be applied in each individual case. This legal mechanism ensures also the protection of (legitimate) interests of private entities. There can be no legal justification for adding to those reasons listed in the Law any additional reasons for restricting the public's right and for doing so by secondary legislation. Apart from being rather problematic from the legal viewpoint, to put it mildly, such additional restriction of the public's right brings to mind uncomfortable memories of the "blacked-out" agreement signed with Fiat, the two "confidential" and failed attempts at striking privatisation deals for the Copper Mining and Smelting Basin of Bor with partners whose solvency was questionable, the "secretive" and failed concession agreement with the now-defunct construction company Alpina for the Horgos-Pozega Highway and many other cases that have been pointed out in the reports of the Commissioner and the Anti-Corruption Council.

I would like to point out that I brought the shortcomings of the Bylaw at the time of its passing, two months ago, to the attention of the then Minister of Finance and Economy. There has been no response, which can probably be attributed to the reconstruction of the Government which followed soon after. Now I expect a swift and proper reaction.

The Commissioner will certainly, when acting upon complaints, give absolute supremacy to the provisions of the Law and base his legally binding decisions exclusively on those provisions. Furthermore, if the Ministry fails to bring the Bylaw in compliance with the Law within a reasonable period of time, the Commissioner will, for reasons of general legal certainty, ask the Constitutional Court to assess the constitutionality and legality of the disputed provision of the Bylaw."