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Montenegro in The Open Government Partnership (OGP): Plans and Results

Dina Bajramspahić, our researcher, presented the experience in the preparation of the first Action Plan and in participation in the work of the Operating Team responsible for monitoring the implementation of the Action Plan at the public debate “Montenegro in the Open Government Partnership”.

The public debate “Montenegro in the Open Government Partnership” was organized by Centre for monitoring and research (CeMI) on Saturday, November 29, 2014. The panelists were:

  • Vanja ĆALOVIĆ – Executive Director of NGO MANS, independent evaluator for Montenegro in the framework of the Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM);
  • Zoran STOILJKOVIĆ, Ph.D. – professor at the Faculty of Political Science in Belgrade;
  • Dina BAJRAMSPAHIĆ – representative of Institute Alternative in the Operating Team responsible for monitoring the implementation of the Action Plan;
  • Boris MARIĆ – Legal Advisor at Centre for Civic Education (CCE).

Moderator of the discussion was Ana SELIĆ (CeMI). The debate was organized within the project ”Advocating for Open Government”, which is implemented by CeMI, in cooperation with organizations from the Western Balkan and the Southeast Europe, and supported by the European Commission.

Dina has pointed out the following:

”I do not think we have the reason to be satisfied by the results achieved within the OGP initiative. This is partly because of the lack of the Action Plan itself: measures were too declaratively formulated making it difficult to implement them, while the lack of indicators has made it difficult to monitor the implementation. Resources from the budget are not assigned for the implementation of activities; a number of measures have been taken from other Government policy documents and action plans, so the number of activities arising from this initiative is very small. A number of measures has been implemented but did not produce the effects that are an objective and purpose of the initiative. For instance, the portal for submitting petitions electronically has been established, but did not improve the communication between citizens and the Government. The initiative is still relatively unknown, not only to the citizens of Montenegro, but even to government authorities, all of which indicates that the initiative remained on the sidelines of the focus of the Government.

At this point, we are significantly left behind all the countries included in the initiative, which have already adopted Second Action Plan through excellent consultative process with the citizens and organizations of civil society. As you know, the deadline for the final version of the Second Action Plan for all the member countries was June 15 of this year, and deadline for the beginning of the implementation of new AP was July 1, and yet Montenegro has not even began drafting the Action Plan.

Therefore, it is necessary to appoint the remaining members of the new OGP Operating Team, Government and NGO representatives, as soon as possible. A recommendation of Institute Alternative is to include representatives of the Union of Employees and of the Association of Municipalities of Montenegro in the Operating Team, in accordance with the Initiative principles on inclusion of all the society sectors in the public policy creation and building a stronger bond between citizens and the Government. The process of the creation of a new Action Plan must be widely participatory, i.e. it must actively involve citizens through, for example, consultative meetings where the Initiative will be presented, while the suggestions from the citizens will be collected. From the experience of drafting and implementation of the First AP, we learned that that smaller number of measures should be adopted which will have a transformative character and truly introduce change in the way the public administration operates when it comes to accountability, transparency and the quality of public services.

For the implementation of the measures presented in the new action plan it is necessary to allocate budgetary resources, which will be an indicator of a true will of the Government to contribute to the completion of the initiative goals.”

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Press Release: Anticorruption Bill Needs a Thorough Revision

Institute Alternative is urging the lawmakers to amend and thoroughly revise the Anti-Corruption Bill. If passed in its current form, the Bill will not ensure effective prevention of corruption.

The biggest shortcomings of the Bill are the following: imprecise definition of conflict of interest and of the procedures for disclosure of assets of public officials, lack of encouragement of whistleblowers to report corruption, and inefficient Agency powers to combat corruption.

The most powerful mechanism of this Agency, which is planned to be established in 2016, was supposed to be administrative investigation, i.e. the ability of the Agency to freely collect data from the public authorities. However, under the current Bill, Agency is deprived of access to information and documents public authorities refuse to provide.

IA also proposes removing the possibility for a public authority to receive sponsorship (or entering into a sponsorship agreement), and specifying which data are public officials required to disclose in the property cards.

It is also necessary to establish the obligation for the Agency to publish which public officials have (not) given consent to access their financial data. This would highlight positive examples of public officials who have nothing to hide, and provide additional incentive to competent institutions and civil society organizations to investigate the assets of those officials who refused to grant access to their financial data.

Additionally, one of the major shortcomings of the Bill is insufficiently precise definition of conflict of interest, which imposes the need to provide additional guidance to public officials to declare conflict of interest or to the Agency to decide on the conflict of interest. In addition, public officials are not required to disclose personal information about their relatives who do not live with them in the same household, which makes it difficult to explore conflict of interest.

When it comes to encouraging reporting of corruption and protection of whistleblowers, the current Bill has many shortcomings. Although it provides the right to award for whistleblowers who have contributed to generating public revenues or revenues of private companies, the process of exercising this right is left in the hands of public authorities or private legal entities which have generated revenue.

However, IA believes that in cases when reporting of corruption contributed to generating revenues of public authorities, it is necessary to provide possibility for these persons to directly address the Agency in order to collect their prize, paid from the budget of Montenegro.

Finally, the misdemeanour provisions provided by this law are primarily aimed at the public authorities and not at public officials, which is a nonsense. It is obvious that the purpose of the punishment for breaking the law is not achieved by punishing the authority to pay a fine from the budget of the authority in favor of the budget of Montenegro.

Stevo MUK
President of the Managing Board

 

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Depoliticizing Montenegro’s Senior Civil Service: Serving Party or People?

This paper argues that Montenegro still needs to efficiently tackle politicization of its senior civil service. At the time of its formation in 2011, almost half of the members of one of the main bodies of the ruling Democratic Party of Socialists held top posts in state administration. Almost one tenth of members of the Main Committee of the Social Democratic Party, the other ruling party, also came from senior civil service.

Implementation of the new Law on Civil Servants and State Employees has not managed thus far to decrease the magnitude of this politicization. On the contrary, it demonstrated many deficiencies, summarized as follows:

- Loose recruitment and dismissal criteria, which make senior civil service positions a subject of inter-party bargaining;

- Undated resignations formally filed to the prime minister-designate upon the personal request of senior civil servants;

- Low levels of professional credentials of prospective senior civil servants as outlined in the acts on internal organization and systematization of work positions;

- Non-implementation of performance appraisal in a large number of institutions;

- Weak institutional capacities for safeguarding the principle of the civil service’s political neutrality;

- Reluctance of senior civil servants to protect their rights via official channels.

With an aim of addressing these shortcomings, capacities of key institutions need to be upgraded, legislation amended and oversight regarding implementation of the law strengthened.

This policy brief has been prepared in the frame of the TRAIN Programme 2014 (Think Tanks Providing Research and Advice through Interaction and Networking), which is supported by the German Federal Foreign Office (Stability Pact for South East Europe) and implemented by the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP).

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Press release: Underused Control Mechanisms of the Parliament

We urge the representatives of the parliamentary minority in all parliamentary working bodies to use their right to two automatically approved control hearings in this year.

Under the Rules of Procedure of the Parliament of Montenegro and the Law on Parliamentary Oversight of the Security and Defense Sector, the opposition in the Parliament is granted the right to initiatives which are adopted without voting.

Namely, the importance of the oversight of the security and defense sector was recognized, as well as the possibility of blocking initiatives of the minority in the Security and Defense Committee by the parliamentary majority. Therefore, the Law on Parliamentary Oversight of the Security and Defense Sector from 2010 stipulates that the initiatives of the opposition shall be adopted twice a year without voting. Accordingly, the Law provides that the Committee shall hold a meeting at the request of one-third of its members with one topic on the agenda once during regular sitting of the Parliament.

Modeled after this provision, the Rules of Procedure of the Parliament of Montenegro was amended in 2013 and this right was granted to the opposition in every parliamentary committee, in order to strengthen the overall control function of the Parliament.

However, in the first six months of 2014, the right to “minority” initiative was exercised in only one committee – the Committee on International Relations and Emigrants, in relation to the issue of Prevlaka[1].

Thus, we urge the parliamentary minority to exercise this right in all other committees as well, by accomplishing agreement on the issue that will be proposed and, in this manner, initiate oversight of the state authorities and deliberate on issues of importance.

When it comes to the Security and Defense Committee, the opposition has not yet exercised its right to these hearings in the current year. Although the Committee held two control hearings in 2014, one of them was initiated by the Media Union, while the other was initiated by MP Bulatović on behalf of the opposition on July 22, 2013, but the hearing was postponed until April this year.

Additionally, the Anti-corruption Committee initiated conducting a joint meeting in relation to the Telekom affair with the Security and Defense Committee, but this activity has not yet been realized.

Under the Law on Parliamentary Oversight of the Security and Defense Sector, the Security and Defense Committee is granted highly important mechanisms for the control of institutions within security and defense sector. However, these mechanisms are underused. This is confirmed by the fact that there were no control visits to the institutions in 2014 and no initiative for holding consultative hearings has been submitted either by this Committee since 2011.

Dina Bajramspahić,
Public Policy Researcher

[1] The data was provided by the Parliamentary Service of the Parliament of Montenegro on August 1, 2014.

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Our Take on the 2015 Budget Proposal

Confusing increase of expenditures

Besides the increase of the capital budget because of the highway and expenditures for payment of debts, which are in the center of public attention, there are other interesting points in the draft Law on the Budget for 2015, which was made public this Sunday.

Much has been said about the drastic reduction of expenses for business trips. The reduction is certainly there, but only about 25%, i.e. about 1.4 million less than it was planned for 2014 (from 5.4 to 4 million).

The biggest increase in relation to the plan for 2014 are transfers. Transfers to education are almost 15 million higher than in 2014 (an increase of 300%). Similar situation is with the transfers to institutions, which are greater more than 400%, or about 13 million more. MPs must pay attention to these cases and get the explanation what lies behind this increases.

On the other hand, the proposed budget for 2015 no longer has a clearly separated amount that will be transferred to public enterprises. Are these really gone from the state budget, or are they hidden in another budget line – this is also an issue that needs to be clarified.

Compared to 2014, there has been an increase in service contracts (about 15%), despite the recommendation of the SAI to reduce this type of employment. SAI indicated that this practice where service contracts are used to employ people who perform usual and planned activities of the state authorities (therefore occupying positions that are systematized) is not in accordance with law.

Bigger budget for almost all spending units

The budget of almost all spending units budget has been increased, except for a few exceptions, such as the Parliament of Montenegro, Ministry of Sustainable Development and Tourism (and the Agency for Environmental Protection), General Secretariat of the Government of Montenegro (and Concessions Commission), Commission for Control of State Aid, Ministry of Science, Labour Fund, etc.

Reduction of the budget for the Commission for Control of State Aid is especially worrying. After a review of guarantees given by the Government, the SAI, among other things, recommended strengthening of this body’s capacities.

Failure to comply with the Guidelines of macroeconomic and fiscal policy

We would like to remind that the Government adopted Guidelines of macroeconomic and fiscal policy in May this year, which, among other things, contain spending thresholds for key spending units for the next three years. Thresholds for the next year are binding and must be respected, while the ones for the next two years are only indicative.

These thresholds (limits) have been breached on several instances in the 2015 budget proposal. The clearest case is the budget of the National Security Agency, which was increased by almost half a million compared to 2014 and well over the established limits of the Guidelines. Similarly, the budget of Ministry for Information Society is more than 2 million higher than the limit in the Guidelines. There are a number of such cases, and according to our information, in case of overdraft limit is not about interest rates, repayment of debts, budget reserves, donations or co-financing of IPA projects, which are outside the limits of the Guidelines.

The good side – higher budget for oversight

To its credit, the Government has fully honored the request of the State Audit Institution which received the funds as it was looking for – around 1,4 million euro for 2015. So, this time there was no reduction of the request for allocation of budget funds by the Ministry of Finance, which had occurred in previous years.

Somewhat higher budget compared to the plan for 2014 is now planned for the Ombudsman, the Agency for protection of personal data and free access to information, the Inspection Directorate as well as the Prosecutor’s Office and the Judiciary.

A bit more time for the budget debate

This is the first annual budget proposal, which is prepared according to the newly adopted Law on Budget and Fiscal Responsibility, which means – the first time that the Parliament received budget proposal earlier than in previous years (by 15 November, instead of the end of November). Of course this does not mean that it is now enough time for proper parliamentary consideration of the budget – we are still far from the best practice that says the Parliament should have a minimum of three months to consider the budget proposal. However, we hope that more time for discussion will have an impact on the parliamentary debate on the budget and that all the working bodies will consider the budget proposal. We recall that last year there were about 70 amendments to the budget by the MPs and that many were in the end endorsed by the majority in plenary. So, even in such a short period of time, there is room for the Parliament to react and make appropriate adjustments.

How to analyze the data “locked” in pdf?

Ministry of Finance does not publish budgetary data in a in a machine readable format. Now, we have the budget for 2015 only as a scanned document on the website of the Parliament in which the numbers are “locked”. This way, the Parliament, media, NGOs and citizens are placed in a disadvantageous position in regard to discussing and analyzing the budget. Message to the Ministry of Finance is — open up the budget and publicly share your excel tables with us!

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(De)motivation?

Instead of tackling with the pervasive corruption, our state authorities are currently occupied by rearranging deadlines in an attempt to foresee how much time will be needed in the next year to meet the obligations of this year.

Evaluation and review of action plans for Chapters 23 and 24 are essential for the continuation of the negotiations, but activities in the prevention and repression of corruption must be intensified and compliant. These are two parallel and inseparable processes.

A new European Commission in early November, officially began its five-year term, and its appointment and presented work priorities, have already raised dust across Europe- in the member states of the Union, because the European citizens “tested” for the first time the opportunities to voice their influence on the election of the president of this body and in the Western Balkan because of the clear message that there is no joining while the composition of the Commission “measures” progress in reforms. Use of this latest, somewhat discouraging EU accession, but based on a realistic assessment of progress in the candidate countries, implies a number of conclusions on Montenegrin context.

Montenegro has not used the first positive wave in the negotiation process, which was granted by temporary closure of two chapters, the opening of an additional ten, including two of the most challenging ones, pertaining to the rule of law, the fight against corruption and organized crime. This “thanks” to what is the failing of 2014 abounded measures from the action plans for chapters 23 and 24, violation of deadlines, modifying activities and lack of commitment for implementation of certain measure. Therefore, instead of having to cope with pervasive corruption, our state authorities are being currently occupied by rearranging terms in an attempt to predict how much time they would still need in the next year to meet the obligations of this year. Moreover, those obligations are related solely to the improvement of legislation in this area. Therefore, in 2015, we should expect further preparation for the institutionalization of the Anti-Corruption Agency, the implementation of unrealized activities from Strategy to fight corruption and organized crime, which expires at the end of this year, networking and strengthening cooperation among existing bodies that lack the capacity and competence necessary for an impartial and independent work. All but not the prosecution of the cases, especially those at a high level, on which the European Commission insists in the reports on progress from year to year. Evaluation and review of action plans for Chapters 23 and 24 are essential for the continuation of the negotiations, but prevention and repression of corruption must be intensified and it must be compliant. These are two parallel and inseparable processes.

It seems that the 5-year period, during which there will be no joining, is the real test of seriousness of the institutions aimed at overcoming the current “semblance of reforms” and providing measurable results. Clearly, the prospect of integration remains the main driver of reforms in the fight against corruption, judicial reform, and promotion of human rights. Translated to interim benchmarks of the European Commission for the progress in the negotiations: Montenegro should establish an initial balance of the results achieved in an efficient and effective investigation, prosecution and convictions in cases of corruption. Montenegro needs to implement and assess the impact of measures taken to reduce corruption in sensitive areas and takes corrective action when necessary, including disciplinary and criminal measures in cases of identified irregularities. Montenegro should ensure adequate involvement of civil society in the development, implementation and monitoring of policies.

These days, the European officials are racing to send the message that Montenegro should not be discouraged by the announced dynamics of expansion. There is no reason for concern. Nothing motivates Montenegrin state authorities like long-term deadlines.

Jovana MAROVIĆ, PhD

Research Coordinator in Institute Alternative

Member of the working group for Chapter 23

Text originally published in the ”Forum” of daily Vijesti