Source: «Politika»
The current situation brought back to public life two legal projects which heathed the atmosphere this past summer despite the already high temperature of our political life. Namely, at the beginning of June, the Government quickly and with no public debate confirmed and sent to the National Assembly the Proposal of the Law on Alterations and Additions to the Law on Information. The Proposal was widely criticized by almost the entire expert public. There were obviously many justified criticisms since the proposing entity submitted amandments to almost all of the articles and, in such a way, considerably altered the original proposal. But, even though numerous shortcomings regarding their obvious anti-constitutional nature have been dealt with, numerous others remained. The Ombudsman initiated the proceedings which aim to determine the constitutional nature of the law.
Without any desire to guess as to what the outcome of the process will be, I think that the law cannot 'pass' constitutional control. But, of course, this is up to the Constitutional Court. Even though, an impuls which comes from the 'international community' could determine the faith of this law even before the Constitutional Court's decision. Namely, the EU Commission report on the European reform progress in Serbia speaks of 'reasons for worry' because of the Law on Information, which could, as a probable consequence, lead to the the removal of the law from the legal corpus. At the end of June, also swiftly and with no expert debate, the Law on Data Confidentiality was finalized. This law caused a similar 'rucus'. The first criticisms were pointed out by the Commissioner for Data Protection and the Ombudsman, who were joined by numerous other independent institutions, such as the Anti-Corruption Agency, the media, journalist associations, civil sector, and the expert public. Despite the fact this started story started as the previous one, the end was different. The story ended in a good, unfortunately for us not a common way - with a statement of the Ministry of Justice indicating the readiness to accept criticisms, fix the proposal, and, if necessary, withdraw it altogether. The Ministry of Justice asked the Council of Europe for its expert opinion after the fact.
The legal opinion from the Council of Europe - formulated by Peter Kostelka, the Ombudsman of Austria, Natasa Pirc-Musar, the Ombudsman of Slovenia, and the experts from the International Ombudsman Institute from Insbruck and the Padova University Human Rights Center - confirmed the criticisms of the law. A few things are characteristic of both cases. In both cases the 'international community' confirmed what was already stated loudly and clearly by our expert public. In both cases the criticisms were argumented, while the proposals were supported by political power. Finally, in both cases, the majority of criticisms did not delve into sophisticated questions of European standard application, but into 'solutions' that are obviously anti-constitutional and even go against relevant international documents and other most basic common legal principles. All this brings this question to mind - do we really need the help of the EU and the Council of Europe experts in order to recognize the unsustainability of such 'solutions', even though our numerous 'experts' keep on trying to present them as 'European'?
There is no doubt that the help of the international community experts is needed and more than welcome. The difficult and complex task of harmonizing the inconsistent and anachrone legal system with acquis communauitare, without the aforementioned help, would be impossible. That is why the help should be sought and used for these purposes, and not to obtain answers to questions to which every society ought to know the answers. In the knowledge of independent institutions and the civil sector stakeholders, the state possesses a resource which would be irresponsible to underestimate, and which deserves a considerably larger influence on legal matters that could be improved as a result. At the moment, the influence is miniscule, and, sometimes, completely nonexistant. This kind of an attitude, if we want to pass adequate laws, as well as save time, nerves, and money, has to be changed.
