The Commissioner for Information of Public Interest and Personal Data Protection has received today the representatives of the Belgrade group of missing babies' parents. Talking with them, the Commissioner greeted the option of the ministries in charge, to set by a special law an adequate mechanism with strong investigative authorizations and independence, in order to reach specific results, on which the missing babies' parents insist for a long time already.

Parents thanked the Commissioner for the assistance rendered so far, and asked for support also in the future, and the Commissioner promised to give it also in the future within the remit of his own authorizations.

Parents' efforts to reach the information about the missing children last for years, inadmissibly long. Already in 2006 the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia Investigation Board has been formed, which submitted a Report on Determined Status and determined the proposal of measures, which, among else, envisaged the task of the Ministry of Interior to investigate all cases of missing babies and to submit a Report within three months, as well as that in the future all cases of such kind shall be processed by the Special Court and Special Prosecution Office.

The parents have already by the end of 2007 asked for the quoted Report from the Ministry of Interior, which was denied to them, and which they have received just after the Commissioner's order. Still, they remained dissatisfied due to failure to implement the quoted measures.

Only in the last couple of years, the Commissioner handled dozens of cases based on complaints by the parents, regarding the „missing babies". In order to help them, he turned by the end of 2008 to the National Assembly Chairlady. After that intervention, the Working Group has been formed in the Assembly, with a similar task to the one of the Investigation Board, but once again without the desired effects.

Even in the Ombudsman's Report for 2010 it has been acknowledged that in the past, there were many defective and non-harmonized procedures which haven't even been consistently followed; that there existed irresponsibilities and sloppiness in keeping records and documents, that there was insufficient respect for the rights of parents for full informing and deciding, due to what without much deeper investigation in each individual suspicious case, one cannot rule out the possibility that someone illegally separated the child from the parents and proclared it dead.

The Ombudsman has therefore proposed in his Report passing of a special law, by which temporary independent body shall be formed, with strong investigative authorizations, which was a case also in the European Human Rights Court in Strasbourg when it accepted the first charge against Serbia in the „missing babies" case.

In relation to that, the Commissioner greets and evaluates as extremely valuable the readiness of the Ministry of Health to make its maximal engagement in the preparation of the law proposal (for which he received personal assurances in direct talks with Minister Lončar). However, he warns that this is a task also requesting and understanding engagement of several other ministries, especially the Ministry of Justice. The parents themselves have, by placing at disposal to the Ministry of Justice "Model of the Law on Missing Babies", provided more than a solid base for law compilation. It shouldn't be allowed that the preparation of the law proposal is unnecessarily prolonged and that the desired effects are once again missing.