Commissioner for Information of Public Importance Rodoljub Šabić has today in Boljevac participated in the work of the round table - seminar on the topic of freedom to access information. The gathering was intended to education of journalists, media and civil society representatives on the local level, and it has been organized in cooperation with the Belgrade Human Rights Center. The Commissioner has stressed in turning to participants, that the ideas of open society and controlled power are integral and that it is very important for further democratization to implement those things on all levels. Stressing that in the work of the government on the local level there are numerous topics evading the attention of big media and the widest public, and which are of great importance for the citizens of the local communities, the Commissioner evaluated that unallowably often public lacks documented information on those topics, and that the attempts to reach them are equally often facing different resistances.
Commissioner Rodoljub Šabić besides else said:
„The fact that citizens, journalists, civil society and media representatives are not sufficiently informed about the contents of the right to have free access to information guaranteed to them by the Constitution and the Law on Free Access to Information, are often „used“ by those who have the information of public interest, in order to aggravate access to those same information, that is, to deprive the public of them. Typical, very frequent form of limiting the right of the public to know is requesting from the applicants for access to information to explain, that is, to prove the reasons or „justified interest“ to do so.
Such request, regardless if it is a consequence of lack of legal knowledge or something else, in any case represents illegal limiting of the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Interest. Citizens, journalists and the other, when requesting information of public interest do not have any obligation whatsoever to prove that for such a request they have any special interest, nor are they obliged to explain to anyone the reasons or motives for asking for such information.
The attitude that it shouldn't be and it must not be asked from the applicants wanting to access information to explain their interests, that is, reasons, is of course not abstract opinion of the Commissioner for Information, but is something deriving from the provisions of Articles 4 and 15 paragraph 4 of the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Interest that strictly provide for that. Otherwise such solutions from our law are completely in line with the standards contained in the relevant international documents regulating those issues, including, of course, the famous Recommendation R (2002)2 of the SE Council of Ministers to the member countries, about insight into official documents.“
