The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection believes it is necessary to ensure consistent application of the legislative provisions pertaining to liability for violation of the public's rights and failure to fulfil the responsibilities towards the public, i.e. the citizens, by all those entities that exercise power or manage public money and public resources on their behalf.
The Commissioner warns that the virtual lack of any liability for breaches of the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance will inevitably have adverse impact on all efforts to combat corruption, crime and abuse. Emphasising that issues were particularly revealing when it came to access to information on the operations of state-owned/public enterprises, Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic said:
"In 186 cases, state-owned and public enterprises at various levels failed to make information available even after being ordered to do so by the Commissioner, although the law explicitly states the Commissioner's orders are binding, final and enforceable. Although this number might seem negligible compared to the total number of cases handled by the Commissioner, it is not so. Quite apart from the fact that the public, i.e. the citizens, have a general right to access the withheld information, such information may well "conceal" things that might be of great interest in an anti-corruption context. It is therefore all the more worrying that large enterprises like Telekom, Srbijagas (Serbian gas company), Zeleznice Srbije (Serbian railway company), PTT Srbija (Post Office) etc. have a high rate of non-compliance with the Commissioner's orders.
On request from the complainants, the Commissioner has been imposing fines and penalties for failures to comply with his orders, but the results have so far been rather modest. For example, today I have passed the second decision on fining the pharmaceutical company Galenika a.d. for a failure to give a requester access to information on grants and sponsorship deals.
It is unacceptable, indeed even cynical, to use public money to pay fines for violations of the law and yet persist with the practice, safe in the knowledge that one would suffer no personal harm.
I have been warning for quite some time now that other mechanisms to enforce compliance, which are not in the Commissioner's hands, have not been used in practice. Pursuant to the law, it is incumbent upon the Government to enforce the Commissioner's orders where necessary, but it has failed to do so for years, ever since the Law took effect. The mechanism to enforce liability for violations of the law is not operational, either. The competent Ministry did not initiate a single proceeding for violations of the law against responsible persons in 2011 and 2012.
It is paramount to change this situation. Consistent application of the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance and imposition of penalties for any violations will certainly provide a considerable impetus to anti-corruption efforts and contribute towards the emergence of a more accountable, more economical and more efficient system."
