Source: "Blic"
It is unacceptable that honest people who come into conflict with formal or informal rules for keeping of various secrets in our country because of their willingness to stand up and protect public interest often face very ugly things. They bear responsibility, they become fired.This was the reason why members of the expert group who wrote the Amending Bill to the Law on Free Access to Information, which was supported by over 70,000 signatures in December 2007 and submitted to the National Assembly for adoption, included an arrangement for protection of whistleblowers in the Bill. That Bill had a very interesting destiny. It disappeared in some kind of a bureaucratic black hole, but it nevertheless appeared after an order from the Commissioner for Information and Ombudsman's intervention. In the end, it turned out that all that „fuss" was not such a bad thing because it certainly contributed to the Government submitting its own Bill.
It is commendable that the Government's Bill is also aimed at elimination of some inconsistencies. It makes sense - most of the arrangements were taken from the Bill which was submitted as a civil initiative. Still, some of them were omitted. Not many of them, just a few, but omission of these particular arrangements raises dilemmas. Omission of provisions relating to protection of whistleblowers is particularly difficult to understand for at least two good reasons. First, many cases from our, unfortunately, rich practice required the Government to include in the Bill guarantees for protection of whistleblowers. Second, if the first is not enough, the Government had to take into account the fact that Serbia assumed formal duties for protection of whistleblowers by ratification of UN Convention against Corruption and CoE Civil Law Convention on Corruption. Will deputies in the National Assembly take it into account?
