The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection welcomed the announcement of the Ministry of Economy that in several forthcoming days the Contract on sale of Smederevo Steel Mill to the Chinese company HeSteal would be disclosed to the public.

Proactive disclosure of information about all, particularly the largest disposals of public property and money, represents the only right attitude towards the rights of the public set forth by the Constitution and the law. The Commissioner considers that it is essential to fulfill the announcement and that it would be good if the procedure marks the beginning of a new practice, the one indispensable for Serbia.

With regard to that, the Commissioner warns that the public still does not have the information about the prior business arrangement related to the Smederevo Steel Mill and that the Ministry of Economy has not fulfilled the obligations in this regard.

Although even then, on the occasion of signing the Contract on providing management services to the Smederevo Steel Mill with the HPK MANAGEMETNT from Belgrade and HPK ENGINEERING B.V. from Amsterdam, it was also announced that it would be made public in short term, not only did it fail to happen, but also the Contract content was not made available to the public even after the final, binding and enforceable decision brought by the Commissioner.

The Contact content has not been disclosed even after the Commissioner imposed two fines in the enforcement proceedings and subsequently required from the Government to enable the enforcement of the Commissioner's decision in line with the law, and even after the Ombudsman and the Ministry of Public Administration established in the conducted oversight procedures that the Ministry had violated the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance and several other laws on multiple occasions, and after they gave adequate recommendations and initiated the misdemeanor proceedings against the responsible persons and the Minister.

The Commissioner warns that with regard to this case and all the other similar cases, some ministers, directors and other officials offer for their violations of the rights of the public 'explications' such as other laws and regulations, trade secrets, approvals of foreign partners, etc, thus only confusing the public without any legal grounds.

The rights provided by the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance can be, the law makes it clear, limited only under the conditions and in the manner stipulated by the law concerned. In addition, in the event of possible conflict of laws, the priority of the Law on Free Access to Information over other laws is an international standard. With regard to that, it is possible to withhold such information from the public, when there are justifiable reasons and when the disclosure of certain information would jeopardize legitimate interests of the other contracting party. However, even then only certain specific information on a legal business could be withheld, and not complete documentation.

Such violations of the rights of the public have a twofold adverse effect. On the general level, because the disobedience of the law and decisions of the competent authorities by the government bodies provides an extremely bad example for the others and undermines the confidence in the whole legal order. And on the particular level, because any avoidance to expose the disposals of the economic and financial public resources to the control of the public, independently of whether there are objective reasons, raises a doubt in corruption and provokes mistrust in state institutions.