Posted on

My Town About My Money – Report on the Openness of Local Budgets

Providing reports to the public and making budget documents available to citizens - these are the prerequisites for more open local self-governments and more accountable public finance. However, these issues do not receive sufficient attention in Montenegro, in particular at the local level. The discussion concerning good local governance tends to be limited to the needs to rationalise public spending and optimise staff numbers, with official requirements posed to Montenegrin municipalities often disregarding the issue of public finance transparency. For this reason, this Report focuses on the key issues of local finance transparency, through an assessment of compliance with the minimum standards related to publication of core budget documents.

The research aimed to identify to what extent citizens were able to access the following documents by navigating the municipal web presentations: Draft Budget Decisions for 2018; Budget Decisions for 2018; Decisions on the Final Budget Account for 2017; Biannual Budget Execution Reports for 2017 and Citizens' Budget Guides. The availability of these documents has been outlined as the key indicator of budget transparency.

Among else, the report has shown that the Budget Decisions are published the most (both the draft and the adopted version), while no municipality published a citizens’ budget in the monitoring period (2017 and 2018). Particularly worrying is the fact that 8 out 23 municipalities failed to publish the decisions on the final budget account. Report includes a separate section on citizen participation in the public discussions on the 2018 local budgets. Finally, given the auspicious timing of the implementation of the new strategic and legal measures, the Report points to possible ways of improving the current practices and webpages.

Posted on

According to the Government, citizens disturb authorities to accomplish their functions

 

A press statement for Daily newspaper DAN on amendments to the Law on Secrecy of Data:

We are overwhelmed with the Government’s persistence in changing the norms regulating access to information and thus preventing the monitoring of public administration’s work, for years.

With the new Proposal of the Law on the Secrecy of Data, article of the Constitution, which guarantees free access to information except exceptionally, has been annulled. Thus, the Constitution defines that the right of access can be limited only “if it is in the interest of: the protection of life; public health; morality and privacy; conducting criminal proceedings; security and defense of Montenegro; foreign, monetary and economic policies.”

Certainly, the Constitution neither stopped the Government nor the Parliament before, so the Law on Free Access to Information already prescribes six unconstitutional grounds for refusing access to information. But it seems like this was not enough to administration to do what it wants, so they prescribed a new absolutely arbitrary basis for marking data as secret which would “result in or might result in harmful consequences, by revealing it to unauthorized person” (…) “due to functioning of the authorities “. And that damage does concern neither life nor health, nor morality, nor privacy, nor criminal procedure, nor security, defense, economy. It’s something additional, something unknown, a mystical risk that we would not understand!

Bearing in mind that EVERY document refers to the exercise of function of the organs, otherwise it would not even exist, this completely annulled the logic of the Constitution based on the understanding that all the “papers” of public administration belong to the citizens who both finance it and for who public administration exists. These amendments will facilitate the implementation of the absolute high-handedness of the authorities in deciding what the public has right to know and implies that the authorities have a purpose of existence that citizens cannot comprehend. That is, citizens are disturbing the authorities to exercise their function.
So far, there has been a practice that the work of the public administration is being mystified in this way and it is being presented as complex and too abstract to be understood by the public, and this is only a new, simplified way for the Government to be less concerned with the public’s pressure to carry out its functions more transparently and responsibly.

Bearing in mind that there is no obligation to carry out a harm test for the information designated in accordance with this article of the law, adding to that – the inefficiency of the Administrative Court and its persistent refusal to make meritorious decisions in regard to the illegal decisions of the authorities, this legal solution ends it all and the administration proclaims that the public will no longer be disturbed by wondering whether and how institutions do their job.

Dina Bajramspahić,

Public policy researcher in IA

Posted on

Agency in the first line for backing DPS again

Agency for Prevention of Corruption (APC), with a very general and vague explanation, denied  access to the Decision establishing that the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) has been illegally financed during the election campaign for the 2016 Parliamentary Elections. The Agency, in the explanation, referred to the Law on Secrecy of Data, without stating which potentially harmful consequences would appear by publishing this document.

Upon our request for free access to information, the Agency issued a decision, sent to us yesterday, stating that the Agency is in the possession of “two acts containing determined facts” related to this case.  The Agency also states that there is a “misdemeanour warrant, by which the Agency had imposed a sanction determined by law in the amount of 20,000 euros to the named political entity” and “the Decision by which the Agency found that this political entity violated the Law and therefore ordered to that political entity to return the funds to the Budget of Montenegro in the amount of 47,500 euro”.

The Agency “allowed” us to inspect the misdemeanour order in its office, even though we did not request this document at all, while the access to the very decision on violation of the Law, which we actually did request – was denied.

In the Decision’s rational, Agency states that the act is “marked by the degree of secrecy “internal”, in accordance with the Law on Secrecy of Data, and because at the same time Special Prosecutor’s Office is leading the procedure involving persons and data cited in the Agency’s Decision on return of funds to the budget”.

However, in its Decision, the Agency does not refer to any specific article of the Law on Secrecy of Data, on which it bases its arguments for marking this document with the degree of secrecy “internal”.

According to Article 3 of the Law on Secrecy of Data, secret information is “data that would have caused or could have adverse harmful consequences for the security and defence, foreign, monetary and economic politics of Montenegro, by revealing it to unauthorised person”.

It remains unclear on the basis of what the Agency estimated that the disclosure of the document would have caused harmful consequences and where does the need for the implementation of the Law on Secrecy of Data in this situation come from, since it does not prescribe obstacles to the parallel work of the Agency and the Special State Prosecutor’s Office.

No special laws regulating the work of the Special State Prosecutor’s Office and the Agency for the Prevention of Corruption prescribe any obstacle for the two institutions, in this case, to do their job transparently, unhindered and independently of one another.

Finally, the Agency’s decision refers to the DPS political entity, and on the other hand, the Special Prosecution does not prosecute against this party, but against its individual officials and members.

By hiding the decision of the Agency, the way in which it conducted the entire procedure remains questionable, as well as the suspicion that it again did not do its job well and that its investigation did not go further from what Đukanović had already publicly admitted on behalf of DPS. Under the public attention, the need for a re-control of the DPS and the repetition of the procedure might arise, which obviously neither Radonjić nor DPS wants.

Institute Alternative is going to file a lawsuit to the Administrative Court against this Agency’s decision and is going to continue to fight for the public’s right to know whether and how institutions do their job.

Ana Đurnić
Public policy researcher

Agency’s decision upon our FOI request is available here (only in Montenegrin).

 

Posted on

New Law on Free Access to Information: Another checked box for Brussels or even more secrets?

Press Statement for Independent Journal “Vijesti” regarding the establishment of the Working Group for the preparation of the new Law on Free Access to Information

 

The Government, with its Work Program, envisaged amendments to the Law on Free Access to Information, but this fact does not necessarily imply that the Government plans to improve the law and delete the contested provisions. On the contrary, the work of the forthcoming Working Group should be cautiously monitored, as there were announcements and reflections of state authorities’ representatives, in public panel discussions, that the changes will go towards decrease in number of authorities that are obligated to law, as well as the extension of all deadlines in the law.

We can see many public advocates of the provision on “abuse of the right to access information”, which, in reality, would mean the right of authorities to arbitrarily evaluate the reasons and interests of the applicant, which is in direct contradiction with the “freedom” of access under Article 3 of the applicable law . The law in force prescribes that every domestic and foreign natural individual has the right to access information without the obligation to state the reasons and to explain the interest in seeking the information.

Such an initiative is also in conflict with the existing concept of the Law that imposes the obligation on the authorities to appreciate information, regarding the harmfulness or prevalent public interest in the publication of information, rather than to evaluate the person (motive) seeking information. Bearing in mind the poorness of legal remedies, the adoption of a proposal to prescribe the “abuse” institute – which would give the right to authority to designate the applicants as “usurper of the institution’s work” – that would only be a new basis for the groundless and arbitrary refusal of access to information of public importance and even greater non-transparency of institutions would be legalised.

This does not mean that there are no anomalies and local-level-based individuals who are extensively using the law, however, such an initiative opens the door for the complete blocking of organisations and media who criticise the work of the public administration, as putting them on ‘blacklist’ and not considering their requests at all would be allowed by the law.

It is disappointing that we had much better law in 2012 than today. The applicable law has many unconstitutional grounds for refusing access to information, several fields were completely excluded (by the law) in the obligation to carry out the test of harm, the prescribed procedures are maximally bureaucratic, etc. Even what is well prescribed is not a guarantee that it will be properly applied, and the authorities continue to very freely express self-will in the law enforcement.

Dina Bajramspahić,
Public policy researcher in IA