The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Processing finds yesterday's public comments by the Prime Minister and the Speaker of the National Assembly in connection with the Commissioner's decision to make publicly available certain pieces of information about the investigation of the "Savamala" case by the public prosecutor's office to be baseless and unfair. Neither the Prime Minister's reference to alleged "double standards" nor the Speaker's allegation of "unspeakable" behaviour have any basis in law or in fact.

Without any intention of polemicizing, but considering it his sacred duty to give the public access to fair and accurate information, the Commissioner notes he made the decision in line with his duty to decide in a lawfully conducted procedure pursuant a complaint filed in accordance with the law.

The decision he made was not an instance of any "double standards", nor was it strange in any way, much less "unspeakable"; quite the contrary – it is consistent with the practice the Commissioner has been promoting over many years and through many decisions, based on the standards enshrined in Serbian laws and generally accepted in the democratic world.

These standards give the public an undisputable right to access information about the work of public officials, which of necessity includes also judicial office holders. The democratic world has come a long way since the times when powerful and yet "nameless" people were able to conduct public affairs, hold trials or conduct investigations.

Without debating whether such comments by holders of the highest public offices in the country could be interpreted as attempts at exerting undue influence on the work of an autonomous control body, the Commissioner notes that the fact that the case file number and the name of the case prosecutor have been made publicly available could in no way and under no circumstances be interpreted as undue influence on the prosecutor's independence. Nor could it, by extension, influence the course of the investigation or direct it in any way, not even in the direction of the "idiots holding the top positions in the city's administration", to borrow the Prime Minister's highly inappropriate turn of phrase.

The Commissioner's decision granted the public only minimum access to information about the "Savamala" case, because his actions were limited by the law to deciding solely on the request submitted by the information requester.

In fact, the Commissioner is of the opinion that competent authorities should have long ago given the public much more information of their own accord, without any intervention by the Commissioner, about this case which has rightly been garnering more and more interest in the Serbian public and internationally.