The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection has sent a request to the Government of the Republic of Serbia that the Government should, as required by Article 28, paragraph 4 of the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance ensure the direct enforcement of three Commissioner's decisions under which the Higher Public Prosecutor's Office in Belgrade is ordered to make available to the public certain documents or information about the case "Savamala".
The aforementioned Commissioner's decisions refer to the following information: a) whether the Prosecutor's Office filed a criminal complaint against the authorized persons with the MoI due to failure to comply with orders and urgency of the Prosecutor's Office in a certain case; b) whether the Prosecutor's Office instituted disciplinary proceedings against the said persons, as well as whether it informed the line authorities about the non-compliance in accordance with the law and c) the professional resume of the involved Deputy Public Prosecutor.
Pursuant to the law, the Commissioner's decisions are final, binding and enforceable, and the Prosecutor's Office was obliged to comply with them several months ago, and non-compliance constitutes a misdemeanour punishable pursuant to the law.
Rather than complying with the decision, the Higher Public Prosecutor's Office informed the Commissioner that it "had proposed to" the Republic Prosecutor's Office to file a lawsuit to annul the Commissioner's decision, and that "compliance with the Commissioner's decision is pointless"!
There are no grounds to claim that compliance with the decision is "pointless". Higher Public Prosecutor's Office was liable to comply with the decision within the time limit specified in the actual decision. Even if the Republic Prosecutor's Office had filed a lawsuit, according to the law, this act in itself does not entail a stay of enforcement of the decision. Pending a decision on the complaint, only the court could have ordered the stay under a special decision.
The Commissioner has been informed informally that within the time limit within which it has been able to do so, the State Public Prosecutor's Office filed a complaint for the annulment of one of the said three Commissioner's decisions. Since the complaint was not even submitted to the Commissioner for reply, he will refrain from commenting, but he must, to put it mildly, express surprise at the fact that the Republic Public Prosecutor has somehow recognized the "violation of the law to the detriment of the public interest" in the Commissioner's order to make available the resume of the prosecutor handling the case "Savamala", by protecting and making unavailable before submission personal data, such as the data on addresses, Unique Master Citizen Number, name of parents, date and place of birth and all other data that are not relevant for the exercise of prosecutorial functions.
Since the Commissioner imposed fines, at the request of the requester, in accordance with the law, in each of the three respective cases, totalling 200,000 RSD, and since even after the imposition of fines, the Prosecutors' Office failed to comply with the law and enforce the decision, the Commissioner requested the Government to ensure the enforcement of his decisions by coercion, in accordance with its statutory liability.
On the occasion of the abovementioned, the Commissioner once again expresses his concern over the fact that the authorities whose primary role should be to protect and enforce laws and human rights give more reason to conclude that they actually obstruct the implementation of laws and the exercise of those rights with their (in) action.
