Source: “Danas”
INTERVIEW – Rodoljub Sabic, the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection, on the implementation of the Law on the Free Access to Information
Belgrade – The fact that the citizens, journalists, NGOs, and others, year after year, have been submitting more and more requests for access to information to institutions at all levels of governance, and the fact that the number of requests is considerably larger than in the beginning, currently at more than several tens of thousands, are, indeed, a confirmation of the greater democratic awareness and readiness to control the Government. The same can be said of the ever-growing number of complaints submitted to the Commissioner, which, again, confirms the determination to persevere in the fight for the fulfillment of rights until the very end. This development of awareness of citizens and the increase in the application of their rights is probably the most valuable result when it comes to the implementation of the Law on the Free Access to Information of Public Importance, Rodoljub Sabic, the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection, stated for ‘Danas’.
What is preventing the implementation of the Law on the Free Access to Information in Serbia?
- As in each country undergoing economic transition, in Serbia there is a multitude of factors that are causing problems for achieving the right to free access to information. The lack of understanding and the underestimation of the importance of the general public, conservatism, and wrong assumptions of people in office regarding their inappropriate actions and behaviors, but, also, the attempts to purposefully remove from the public eye, to hide things such as one’s own incompetence, failure to produce results, irrationality, or, even worse, abuse, crime, and corruption.
What are the reasons why certain governing segments do not apply the Law fully and what that means?
- The reasons are plentiful, but I will only mention the two most distinct ones. The application of the Law began without the two necessary key mechanisms – one mechanism related to the responsibility for violating the Law, and the other for forced fulfillment of the lawful and obligatory decisions made by the Commissioner. In the past five years of the implementation of the Law, thousands of offences have been committed, while only a symbolic number of people was held accountable, around several dozen people. In the same period, the Government, even though it was obliged to ensure the forced fulfillment of the Commissioner’s decisions, failed to do so, not even once. Despite such work conditions, the percentage of successful interventions by the Commissioner was over 95 percent, but behind that small number of unsuccessful interventions, a great number of information, which would have been of importance to the general public, were hidden. After a number of warnings that the lack of accountability and forced fulfillment represents an indirect invitation to break the Law, the recent change of the Law foresees the Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self Government as the institution in charge of surveillance and implementation activities, instead of the Ministry of Culture which did not have or make an attempt to create organizational, logistics, and personnel resources to fulfill its role. This change allows the Commissioner to financially penalize the offenders, and, in that way, ensure the fulfillment of the decisions.
When do you expect the current state of affairs would change?
- As it has been the case, I expect that things will change in continuity, but these changes need to be faster than before. For this purpose, recently, in accordance with the legal mandate of the Commissioner, a new Manual for Composing and Publishing Information Bulletins on the Activities of State Institutions was written. The Manual emphasizes one thing, which many state institutions refuse to understand, and that is that the free access to information has at least two components. The first component encompasses adequate responses to requests for information by citizens and journalists, while the second envisions more than that, but above all the obligation of the authorities to provide as many information as possible related to their activities on a proactive basis, and not wait for someone to request them.
The Manual has an aim to very precisely define the content and the form of the Information Bulletin that the state institutions have to publish. In this regard, a great number of information, starting with the size and the spending dynamics of the budget, the number of employees and their salaries, internal organization, procedures and manuals for achieving certain rights, should be readily available on the internet presentations of all state institutions; this would, besides providing more information on the institutions themselves, and, thus, resulting in fewer complaints to the Commissioner, provide interesting possibilities for comparing available resources and results achieved by various state institutions.
Attention Directed at Public Finances
- There is a lot of interest for information from all spheres of life, but the attention is, to the greatest extent and at all levels of governance, directed to public finances, public procurements, public resources, which is very good and confirms that the citizens and the media have recognized the great anticorruption potential of the Law on the Free Access to Information. What is not good and what is very indicative is the fact that the greatest problems occur when attempting to access those types of information and that in these cases the Commissioner is most likely to intervene, Rodoljub Sabic emphasized.
