Commissioner for the information of public importance reiterated initiative of the Government of Serbia to establish mechanism for carrying out Commissioner's decisions.

Initiative for amending Rules of Procedure of the Government or possible adoption of the special regulation was addressed to the Government by the Commissioner several months ago, in March this year. As there were no outcomes and evaluating the present situation as detrimental for the implementation of Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance, the Commissioner again requested the Government of Serbia to adopt respective regulation.    

In connection with that, the Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic stated that:

„It is necessary to give relevance to the provision of Article 28 par. 2 Law on Free Access to Information of Public importance, where if required, implementation of Commissioner's decisions is ensured by the Government of Serbia.

So far, luckily, such need did not incur too often, because there is relatively small number of cases where authorities did not act according to Commissioner's decision. Several dozens of cases with regard to several hundreds of solved cases surely does not represent a number too large.

But, regardless of the fact whether this number is large or small, failure to implement legal liabilities must not be tolerated. When this is the case, the number tends to grow. Therefore the situation where the Government, in none of the cases when the enforcement of Commissioner's decision was requested by the citizens, has not carried out the latter, although some of the requests were more than one year old, is quite worrying.

Commissioner for information does not have legal or actual capacities to provide implementation of his decisions on his own. Extending the condition where even the Government of Serbia, which has the legal obligation, does not carry out the latter, is in the interest of persons who do not want the real enforcement of the Law on Free Access to Information and has serious detrimental repercussions for further implementation of this Law.

In order to prevent this and for the Government of Serbia to respond to the legally binding obligations in the proper manner, it is necessary to adopt the regulation without delay, for which I have proposed adoption and repeated the initiative.“