Source: "Blic"
When Mr. Rodoljub Sabic was appointed to the function of the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance of the Republic of Serbia in December 2004, he had no office, no associates and no resources.
In what will certainly become an anecdote for future generations, he paid for the making of the official seal of the Commissioner’s Office with his money and he made do with was available until July 2005. Then an office and five associates were provided to him and he operated with those associates until the second half of 2009.
Now there are about thirty persons in his team, although the organization instrument envisages 69 associates. In spite of all that, yesterday his Office boasted a total of 10,259 processed requests, 1,816 requests in procedure and it received 429 cases in April alone.
“Even if we accept no more cases, we would still have to work until the end of the year”, said Mr. Sabic, who recently caused a stir in the public by disclosing an affair involving the Secretariat for Education of Vojvodina, which entrusted a foreign company with highly sensitive control of school database on pupils, parents and teaching stuff worth several millions. The Commissioner ordered the Provincial Secretariat for Education and the company which was awarded the contract to stop everything and to delete collected data for more than 200,000 persons from that database within 10 days.
It took seven years of hard work and tilting at windmills for Mr. Sabic’s function and word to gain relevance and for the state itself, which founded this body, to set seriously about its business. This because the attitude of public authorities towards the Commissioner’s Office when it was founded clearly showed the real intention of its formation: “let’s honour another European procedure on paper, but access to information will be allowed as and when we see fit”.
And it would probably have remained that way had Mr. Rodoljub Sabic not taken his job seriously and started to ask awkward questions and demand answers on behalf of citizens and the public. In that sense, it is hard to find someone more suitable for the Knight of Vocation award, which was presented to him two years ago.
“Things that have been treated as a secret and things that have been denied to people and organizations simply beggar belief. Public authorities sometimes deny information to each other”, said Mr. Sabic, talking about what he has been facing in this job. However, other than for prosaic things which are impossible to access because of sheer bureaucratic inertness and stupidity, Mr Sabic has on a number of occasions been involved in serious conflicts while he sought information which various individuals had strong personal interest to withhold.
He forced into the open the issue of officials’ salaries in public enterprises, the road mafia, he made “Torlak” and “Batut” institutes disclose the truth about purchase of vaccines against swine flu, he was checking whether the Security Information Agency elected public prosecutors and judges, people asked for his assistance regarding former NBS Governor Radovan Jelasic’s villa and the grave of general Draza Mihajlovic and he also had to respond when a voyeur in the police force posted on the Internet inappropriate video footage of two young people in love who got a little carried away near the Belgrade Arena.
In January 2009, after the Law on Personal Data Protection entered into force and after tasks under this Law were delegated to Mr. Sabic, he became a man with the longest name of a function in Serbia – the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection. In this new domain of work he processed about 270 cases of violation of personal data processing and use and the right to privacy during past two years.
Every citizen who doubts or thinks his/her privacy was violated can request protection of the Commissioner and be sure his complaint will not remain just a bureaucratic official note in a register.
Certain people also tried to discredit him (last time by writing that he employed at the Commissioner’s Office a man who “released Bagzi from prison”), sometimes he had to suffer insults, but he said that “there were no serious threats!”
Mr. Sabic trained as a lawyer and is an attorney-at-law by vocation. He gained his first experiences in the office of the famous Belgrade attorney Fila Filota. He was also a deputy at the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia and the Minister of Public Administration and Local Self-government at the Government of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic. He then left the Government of Prime Minister Zoran Zivkovic after a disagreement about the numerous affairs associated with that Government.
He also showed he was a man of principle when he was appointed Commissioner for Information of Public Importance; he resigned from all party political functions and left the Social Democratic Party, of which he was a member, and has not since joined any other political party.
At the end of the previous year, he demonstrated good stewardship of the money allocated to him from the budget, which he did not spend due to the lack of envisaged human resources. He gave to the competent ministry 30 million dinars for relief after the earthquake in Kraljevo.
Rodoljub Sabic was born in 1955 in Derventa, Bosnia; he is married and has a son.
