The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection welcomes the latest amendments to the Regulation on Office Operations recently passed by the Government. The new amendments eliminate the dilemmas faced by many after the previous amendments to the Regulation on Office Operations. Those previous amendments, including in particular paragraph 3 of Article 10, which introduced the marking “official”, caused many to suspect it was nothing more than an effort to illegally introduce a new classification level and restrict freedom of information. For example, based on this assumption, the Anti-Corruption Council of the Government of Serbia filed a motion for a constitutional and legal review with the Constitutional Court.

As the proceedings before the Constitutional Court will certainly be very time-consuming, the Commissioner decided to send a letter to the Prime Minister of Serbia and demand that the Government delete of its own accord the contentious paragraph 3 of new Article 10.

In the latest amendments to the Regulation on Office Operations, the Government has deleted paragraph 3. It has also clarified that the marking “restricted” can only be applied to documents relating to Serbia’s platform in the EU accession negotiations and only until the opening of negotiations on the specific issue. The new marking “restricted” can be applied only to documents distributed internally within the government bodies and does not affect the exercise of freedom of information by other entities. In view of this, there should be no dilemmas about the fact that freedom of information is exercised and may potentially be restricted only in accordance with the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance.