The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection has sent a request to the Government of the Republic of Serbia demanding from the Government, in accordance with its obligations pursuant to Article 28 of the Law on Free Access to Information, to use coercive measures to enforce the Commissioner's decision which ordered the Ministry of Mining and Energy to provide a copy of the initial memorandum of understanding signed between the public enterprise Electric Power Industry of Serbia and 'Amplex Emirates LLC' company to the applicant, a journalist of the The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN).

The Commissioner issued the decision on making the memorandum available to the public in December 2014. Even though the decision is legally binding, final and enforceable, the Ministry has not acted upon it. It has requested a stay of execution without legal basis, and then filed a lawsuit against the Commissioner and his decision with the Administrative Court. The court dismissed the lawsuit.

Subsequently, in the process of execution upon the request of the applicant the Commissioner fined the Ministry, in accordance with the law, with two fines totalling 200,000 dinars. However, since, even after paying the fines, the Ministry has not acted in accordance with the decision, the Commissioner sent the request to the Government of the Republic of Serbia to enforce the decision, pursuant to the law, by direct coercive measures.

This specific case is an illustrative example of incomprehensible persistence in failing to perform one's duties to the public, since it is practically impossible to find a valid or acceptable, even one, at least formal, 'legal' justification for it.

These are certainly not and cannot be the provisions of the Memorandum that the Ministry referred to, which stipulate that access to the information from the contract is granted only by the consent of the contracting parties. Firstly, because the general provisions of commercial contracts cannot, contrary to our Constitution, repeal the application of the mandatory provisions of our law. And this applies in particular to this specific case, especially since even the very Memorandum, in Clause 9 'Press release', item 9.1, stipulates that the provisions on confidentiality and consent do not refer to the decisions made in the process of applying the laws of the Republic of Serbia regulating the matters of freedom of access to information of public importance aiming to achieve and protect the public interest.