In a letter he directed to the Prime Minister today, the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection asked the Government to, by passing a separate bylaw or by changing its internal rules, find a way to adhere to its legal obligation to, in case there is a need, ensure the compliance with the decisions of the Commissioner, and to finally start fulfilling that obligation.

In the Commissioner’s opinion, the increase in the number of disrespected decisions is a direct consequence of the fact that the Government is not obeying its obligation to ensure the decision’s forced fulfillment. This is a serious problem which puts the results achieved in the application of the Law on the Free Access to Information in danger and throws a shadow on the proclaimed Government politics of transparency strengthening, which is a very important presupposition for achieving aims such as further democratization, the fight against corruption, and others, and that is why this problem should be solved without delay.

In this regard, the Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic also stated the following:

“According to the Law, the Commissioner’s decisions are binding, final and executory. The Law is based on the assumption that those to whom the Law applies to would adhere to it, but envisions that, in case there is a need, the fulfillment of the decisions would be enforced by the Government of Serbia. However, none of the three Governments that have come and gone in the mean time had a fair attitude towards their obligation and did not, in situations when a certain government body failed to comply with the binding decision, do practically anything to force the body to do so. On several occasions, I have publicly warned that this kind of an attitude represents a (in)direct invitation to violate the Law.

From the quantitative point of view, at least at the first glance, the problem might not appear so big. From the total number of all accepted complaints, around 4500 in total, in two thirds of cases the intervention of the Commissioner yielded a result, even without a need to issue an official decision, since the state institutions, immediately after the intervention and the request for an explanation, acted according to the request for the free access to information. The Commissioner issued formal warrants, decisions in over 1700 cases and a great number of them have not been executed. The number of decisions that have not been executed or where the institutions failed to inform the Commissioner about the execution is around 300, or a little over 6% of the total number of accepted complaints.

However, we cannot base everything on statistics, the problem is intrinsic and big. In the aforementioned 6%, even though they had to be disclosed, certain information remained inaccessible to the public, for which the public rightfully showed a lot of interest, including some potentially very interesting information from the anticorruption viewpoint. The number of unexecuted decisions is increasing, while nothing is being done about it. Only during the mandate of the current Government, the number has more than doubled. That is very worrying which is why I, at the beginning of this year, submitted an initiative to the Government aimed at passing adequate bylaws or a different regulation which would be the basis for the fulfillment of Government obligations related to the execution of the Commissioner’s decisions. Since this initiative did not yield any results, I thought it was my obligation to by sending this letter to the Prime Minister warn him that any further delay in finding the solution for this problem is difficult to understand and that it will certainly have very adverse consequences.”