In connection with the Budget System Bill, which was confirmed and sent for expedited enactment, the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection said it was not good that there was no public debate about it. An opportunity for the public, in the first place professional public, to give its contribution to the articulation of quality arrangements was missed. Emphasizing it was necessary to improve this Bill by amendments in order to ensure rights of the public enshrined in the Constitution and the law, Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic also said the following:
"It is hard to understand the attitude to the guaranteed rights of the public we have witnessed on this occasion. It is not only the absence of the public from the preparation of an extremely important system law for which it is hard to find an excuse. The fact that the content of the Bill can be seen as practically ignoring the rights of the public is much more important. It is almost impossible even to find the word "the public" in the text of the Bill. It is illustrative, and, of course, worrying, that there was no room for the principle of the public and that it is not mentioned at all, even in Article 4 of the Bill, in which principles on which the budget system is based are listed. Consequently, there was also no room for the rights of the public in other, operative provisions of the Bill.
It is necessary to change qualitatively this attitude towards the rights of the public by amendments. The Budget System Law would particularly have to recognize and emphasize those rights. That Law would not only have to confirm guarantees for access to practically every information on the disposal of budget resources to citizens and to the media, but also to contain arrangements which establish the duty of public authorities to publish as many as possible such information on a proactive basis.
It is very important to constantly expand scope for exercise of the right to access to information on the budget. We must not forget some facts in connection with that. In strategic objectives of the EU, which we want to accede, achievement of the highest standards of the public in the field of public finance is emphasized as an essential thing for legitimacy of every modern government. Under SAA we assumed a duty to continue reforms of public finance system management with the aim to strengthen transparency among other things. And, most importantly, it is impossible to expect serious results in the fight against corruption without strengthening of a mechanism of democratic control of the public. Transparency of the budget at all stages, from preparation, over proposal and adoption, to implementation is the fundamental principle in managing public resources in all modern democratic societies. It must be so in our country as well. It is a condition for exercise of citizens' constitutional rights to information and participation in public affairs and an important assumption for achievement of necessary results in the fight against wastefulness, abuses and corruption."
