Source: "Blic"
Guest Commentator - Rodoljub Sabic, the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance
Serbia is one of the last countries which do not have a modern Law on Security Data Classification. For years, The Commissioner for Information has been warning the public of the serious damage that we suffer due to this and of the necessity to pass the Law. Unfortunately, without any results.
Neither the government nor parliamentary groups have introduced a draft of this Law. However, the civil sector tried to do what was not performed by the "political elite". A coalition of several non-governmental organizations (NGO) formed an expert group that drafted the law. The Commissioner also took part in the group, but as ad personam, not as an official. Furthermore, NGO activists collected tens of thousands of signatures of support and the Draft was forwarded, in accordance with the Constitution, to the National Assembly as far back as the end of 2007.
The Draft was even on the website of the National Assembly for a while, in the section "Legislation in the procedure", and then it just disappeared, as if into a black hole. After long, persistent efforts, initiative applicants were informed that the Draft was in the Ministry of the Interior "in order to verify signatures". They requested additional information from the Ministry of the Interior, but it was never obtained.
They appealed to the Commissioner for Information who ordered the officials to provide the citizens with the information which would explain what was happening. "Silence" continued, so citizens appealed to the Ombudsman. His action was effective, the reasons for "silence" were explained - the Ministry of the Interior informed him that they "have found the mislaid list with 72,000 signatures".
And now what? In the meantime, the Commissioner for Information has become the Commissioner for Personal Data Protection as well. In this capacity, he will have to warn the Ministry that any processing of personal data is to have proper legal grounds. Such grounds for "the verification of signatures" of civil initiative applicants do not exit nor have ever existed.
Could we at least derive some benefit from this pointless vicious circle? Perhaps, if what had happened turns into a motif for those in charge to consider what is the attention that a democratic society owes to an initiative of tens of thousands of citizens. Or, instead of nourishing illusions about "our high administrative capacity," to consider the fact that we have to do much more work to really improve that capacity.
