The Commissioner for Information said that several statements made by the Director of the Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) to a number of media in the last couple of days could create a dilemma in the minds of at least one part of the public, not only as regards the contents of the Commissioner's request in connection with the EUROSONG budget, but, more importantly, as regards the reach and contents of the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance and the rights of the public in general. Saying that he could best disperse with these dilemmas by just appearing for several minutes on the “public” service program (in an interview with the Director of RTS or individually), but adding that this was impossible given the current editorial policy of the “public” service, Commissioner Rodoljub Šabic gave the following statement:

“I was literally drawn into the argument with the Director of RTS by a bunch of insults, cheap base disqualifying statements and lies which he said about me in the interview to “Vecernje novosti”, ensuring that they were repeated later on RTS in the form of “news”. I would not react to vulgarities as such, but I just had to respond to lies expressed in statements like: “he compromised his position by requesting us to make the budget calculation in three days”. Quite simply, the request of the requester and my order did not require any budget calculation, report on budget implementation or final account, i.e. a document which is not yet prepared by RTS. The subject of the order was the budget, the plan, the projection of resources necessary for financing, a document which, in normal circumstances, has to be prepared long, long before such an event.

Later even the Director of RTS showed in a new interview, which was published in “Pravda” yesterday, that he understood to which document my order referred after all. This is a good thing, but a not so good thing is the fact that he started making comments on the provisions of the law, for which he is not competent, in an attempt to “explain” in a new way that the Commissioner's order was not right after all. Since the “arguments” he uses could give rise to new dilemmas, not only in this but in other situations as well, I fell obliged to make some comments about them.

So, the Director of RTS said: “we published the amount of the Eurosong budget in papers and there is no need to send it separately to Mr. Šabic. Under the law, we have the right to that, because information published in media does not have to be submitted to the Commissioner.”

I do not know where and when the Eurosong budget was published, and in more than two months since the procedure began RTS did not mention it in a word. But even under well-intentioned assumption that it has been published after all, I still have to say that people in RTS should know that it would not set them free of the duties specified by the law, nor could it be an excuse for elementary ignorance of the law. Because it is specifically set by the Law (Article 10) that in case that a subject of a request is a previously published document, in an answer to request it has to be specified when and where it was published and on which medium it was published (“Official Gazette”, web site, name of the paper etc.). Failure to comply with this duty is treated as an infringement under the law (Article 46) and is subject to a fine. As regards provision of information, the Law specifies in Article 16 that, on the Commissioner's order, information has to be submitted to a requester of information and not to the Commissioner, who should be only notified about it, and failure to provide information is an infringement under the Law.”