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Administrative Court to review Agency’s Decision to hide evidence against DPS

Institute Alternative (IA) filed a lawsuit to the Administrative Court to annul the Agency for Prevention of Corruption’s Decision denying us access to a document in which it determined that DPS was illegally financed in the 2016 pre-election campaign.

Through free access to information, we requested the Decision of the Agency for Prevention of Corruption (ACA) in which it has established that the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) had violated the Law on Financing of Political Entities and Election Campaigns and ordered this political entity to return 47,500 euro to the Budget of Montenegro. However, Agency denied us access to the Decision, referring to the Law on Secrecy of Data, without stating which potentially harmful consequences would appear by publishing this document.

In the lawsuit, we pointed out that the Agency’s reasoning to mark the document as secret due to the fact that “Special Prosecution is simultaneously prosecuting persons and data specified in the Decision of Agency on return of funds to the budget” is unfounded. The document we requested is not about persons, as claimed by the Agency, but about the DPS as a political entity. What is known to the public is that Special Prosecution does not conduct proceedings against this political entity, but against its particular officials.

Decision of the Agency solely refers to a political entity, which the public is already familiar with in detail, as it has been informed about persons and specific data related to the administrative and criminal subject matter, therefore there are no reasons to classify the given Decision with the degree of secrecy.

In addition, Agency should not have to base its decision on any data of the Special State Prosecutor’s Office (SSPO), because at this stage, SSPO does not have indisputable evidence nor has it issued an indictment. Agency was obliged to carry out its own procedure within its jurisdiction and establish the facts, independently of the SSPO.

In the lawsuit, we pointed out that according to the Law on Secrecy of Data, “a classification of information shall not be designated if data are classified in order to cover up a criminal offence, the exceeding or abuse of competence, or some other unlawful act or behaviour or administrative error”.

Furthermore, we stressed that, according to the Law, “the obligation of classification and deciding on level of classification of information arises at the moment of creating or coming to knowledge of that information, or at the moment of undertaking the action for creating that information.”

However, the Agency marked the decision by the degree of secrecy “INTERNAL” right after we asked for it in the request for free access to information – on February 15th, although the press release that it had found illegal financing of DPS was issued on February 11th . Therefore, it is obvious that the Agency acted contrary to the provisions of the Law on Secrecy of Data, in order to illegally hide the content of the acts we requested, by misusing its authority.

We remind the public that by hiding the decision of the Agency, the way 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.

Interest of the public to get to know the content of the Decision of the Agency is unquestionable, which is why we requested the Administrative Court to make a meritorious decision upon our lawsuit and to annul the Agency’s Decision which seeks to hide evidence that the DPS was illegally financed in the election campaign for the 2016 parliamentary elections.

Stevo Muk
President of the Managing board

 

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“My Town About My Money” on the Radio of Montenegro

Presentation of the key findings on openness of local budgets from new Institute Alternative report, “My Town About My Money” was special topic for the show “Mozaik” on the Radio of Montenegro. Beside presenting our findings on quality of the reporting to the public and availability of municipal budgetary documents, this report also launched a wider discussion on importance of proactive publishing of information on public finance and citizen inclusion regarding the issues that are directly related to them. Special emphasis was on the provisions of new Law on Local Government Financing, which brought important new obligations for municipalities regarding budgetary transparency.

Milena Muk, public policy researcher in Institute Alternative, Snežana Mugoša, general director of Directorate for Local Self-Government and State-owned companies in Ministry of Finance spoke for the show with editor of the show, Gorica Vukčević, RTCG.

You can listen the record of the radio show “Mozaik” in the attachment.

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WeBER findings: Public service and human resource management

Are tasks characteristic for civil service performed outside merit-based based regime? How open, transparent and fair is the recruitment into the civil service? How effective is the protection of senior civil servants’ position from unwanted political interference? Find out in this WeBER infographic, summarising the key findings of our regional Monitoring report:

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Government to withdraw proposed amendments to the Law on Classified Information

At the initiative of NGO MANS, Institute Alternative signed a press release of the following content:

GOVERNMENT TO WITHDRAW PROPOSED

AMENDMENTS TO THE LAW ON CLASSIFIED INFORMATION 

We urge the Government of Montenegro to withdraw the Draft Law on Amendments to the Law on Classified Information from the procedure, to organise a public hearing and harmonise this document with international standards.

This Draft Law, adopted last week by the Government without any public or expert debate, envisages the introduction of a new basis for declaring data classified, which is not in accordance with the Constitution or international agreements that bind Montenegro, including Article 19, paragraph 3 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Article 10, paragraph 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and Article 3 of the Council of Europe Convention on Access to Official Documents.

The Constitution precisely prescribes under what conditions information in the possession of state bodies can be declared classified and in no case stipulates provision from the Draft Law that the data can be hidden from the public for “exercising of the authority of a body”.

International conventions ratified by Montenegro stipulate that restrictions on access to information must be necessary in a democratic society and proportionate to the aim of protection. Article 19, paragraph 3 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as Article 3 of the Council of Europe Convention on Access to Official Documents, provides a precise list of reasons for possible limitations to access to information, and they do not stipulate that official documents may be secret because of “exercising of the authority of a body”.

If the Government adopts this Draft Law, it will have a very negative impact on the work of the media and civil society, and would make it almost impossible for journalists and NGOs to detect corruption and other violations of the law, but also to monitor the implementation of various government policies and obligations from the European integration process.

We remind that the European Commission in its reports on Montenegro, as well as the European Parliament in its resolutions, repeatedly urged the Government of Montenegro to increase the transparency of its work and enable access to information to the public. Such Draft Law adopted by the Government is contrary to these recommendations and represents a huge step back.

For these reasons, we urge the Government to withdraw the Draft Law on amendments to the Law on Classified Information, organizs a public debate on this document and ensure that it is in accordance with the Montenegrin Constitution and international standards that our country is obligated to respect.

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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.

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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