In a letter addressed to Ana Brnabic, Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection pointed out the worrisome inadequate attitude of the Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government towards its obligations stemming from the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance and the necessity to completely change such an attitude.
The immediate cause for writing this letter was the scandalous, bizarre "case" of the City Department of Expertise in Belgrade which was ordered by the Commissioner on two occasions to provide (to the newspaper "Danas" and to the citizen D.D.) the requested information or documents from which the number of cases in which the expert analysis has been conducted by forensic expert L.M., the subject of expertise, value of disputes and parties to these cases can be inferred.
The Commissioner's decisions are final, binding and enforceable pursuant to the law, however, the City Department of Expertise failed to act upon them within the specified time line. It also failed to act after it was imposed statutory fines by the Commissioner, or after the Administrative Court dismissed the City Department's complaint as inadmissible, it even failed to act after the Republic Public Prosecutor refused to request the Administrative Court to annul the Commissioner's decisions at the initiative of the City Department.
During all that time, the City Department of Expertise was publicly "explaining" its failure to act upon the decision by using some kind of unacceptably low-level "statutory arguments", which indicate either an extremely alarming ignorance of the law or something worse than that, since the expertise and formal qualifications of the expert L.M. were challenged and more than seriously questioned by presenting a copy of her diploma, in which several facts indicate that it is a fake.
The above proceeding of the City Department of Expertise involved several, quite obvious, punishable misdemeanours referred to in Article 46 of the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance. The supervisory function of the Ministry undeniably involves the right, as well as the obligation, to act upon these misdemeanours, all the more because they got a lot of publicity; however, the Ministry failed to react, even in such a flagrant case.
The Commissioner stresses that the "case" of the City Department is only an immediate cause to raise this issue with the Ministry, and that there are much more fundamental reasons to do so. Only in the course of this year the Commissioner (although that is not its obligation) has informed the Ministry about 266 cases of violations of the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance. In addition, these are only the most flagrant violations; the real number of violations is much greater than that. It is not known whether or not the Ministry has instituted misdemeanour proceedings in any of these cases, and if it has, it is a negligible number of cases.
These facts suggest that, so far, the Ministry's practice has not nearly been in line with its statutory role and that this must change. Continuing with such practices would constitute tacit yet unequivocal indulgence of obvious and multiple violations, practically, an invitation to disregard and ridicule one of the fundamental principles of functioning of an orderly state, the principle of legality.
