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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).

 

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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

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Most of municipalities do not publish key budgetary documents

A third of municipalities did not publish the annual budget report for 2017, while only four local governments published semi-annual reports on budget execution.

With the aim of presenting current situation and relevance of proactive disclosure of information on local budgets, Institute Alternative and the NGO New Horizon conducted comparative research and analysis of the websites of 23 local governments in Montenegro.

We wanted to learn to what extent citizens can get familiar with the way their municipality collects, plans and spends the budget, only by searching official websites. This included an overview of the websites of the municipalities in Montenegro to determine whether key budgetary documents are being published. We searched for draft decisions on the municipal budget for 2018, adopted budget decisions for 2018, decisions on the final budget account for 2017, semi-annual reports on budget execution in 2017 and budget guides for citizens.

Out of all searched documents, the most regularly published document is budget decision (draft and adopted version), while in 2017 and 2018 no municipality published budget guide for citizens, which, for the purpose of our research, entailed simplified and citizen-friendly presentation of a budgetary document.

The worst ranked municipality is Plav, which did not have a functional website during the research period at all. The Municipality of Ulcinj, which has only one budgetary document (the 2018 budget decision) published, also shares very few information on public finances with its citizens.

Having in mind the importance of the final budget account as a document which, among the other things, should show the deviation of the local expenditure from the annual budget plan and include the report on capital projects, the fact that 8 out of the 23 municipalities did not publish the adopted version on the final account of the local budget is especially concerning. This means that the citizens were not able to obtain complete information on the execution of the 2017 local budgets through websites of municipalities of Budva, Gusinje, Kolašin, Kotor, Petnjica, Plav, Rožaje and Ulcinj.

Only four municipalities published reports on budget execution during the first six months of 2017 (Bijelo Polje, Nikšić, Pljevlja and Podgorica). In-year reporting on budget execution is important so that citizens and other stakeholders can have timely insight into the dynamics of public spending and an adequate baseline for planning of future budget priorities.

Even when the information concerned is published on the websites of the municipalities, it is often located in website sections, which are not easy to find and cannot be accessed directly from the home page. In certain cases, documents are presented under wrong and misspelled names. Example in this sense is the municipality of Nikšić which, although it published the final account of the budget for 2017, did it with misspelling each word in the name of the document and made it unsearchable for citizens who type the name of the document in the ‘search’ box. Also, most published documents are not available in a machine readable form, making it difficult to search and download key budgetary items that are especially important to particular groups of citizens.

Following the recommendation of Institute Alternative, the new Law on financing local governments has brought a series of novelties regarding the obligation of municipalities to submit in-year budgetary reports both to the Municipal Assembly and to the public. In the coming period, we will monitor how these new obligations are implemented.

The research on the openness of the local budgets was conducted within the project Money Watch: Civil Society, Guarding the Budget, which is implemented by the Institute Alternative in partnership with the Institute of Public Finance from Zagreb and NGO New Horizon from Ulcinj. The project is financed by European Union and co-financed by the Ministry of Public Administration. Findings of the research are sole responsibility of the Institute Alternative and NGO New Horizon and does not reflect the opinion of the European Union and Ministry of the Public Administration.

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Government ignored proposals for enhancement of its Work Programme

Proactive informing of citizens on the use of the budgetary reserve and of parliament on execution of budget, as well as proactive reporting on the implementation rate of the European Commission’s recommendations – these are some of the obligations that the Government has refused to include in the 2019 Work Programme.

Institute Alternative has submitted its proposals in order to improve Government’s 2019 Work Programme. Our proposals largely fall under the scope of Ministry of finance and Ministry of justice. However, they have not been accepted, apart from the obligation of preparing the Law on the Protector of Property and Legal Interests of Montenegro. Still, as this particular obligation is being repeated in the Government’s work programnes year after year, it is uncertain that it reflects the content of our request for more precise procedure of personnel selection and functioning of this important but neglected institution in our legal system.

We have proposed to the Government to compile the Information on the use of the current budgetary reserve in 2018. For years, we have warned that hiding information on the spending of budget units and the Commission for Allocation of the Part of the Budgetary Reserve Funds, with individual amounts paid out, its purpose and the user of funds, leaves room for abuses. We believe that this information must be made available to the public. As long as this Commission is accountable solely to the Government of Montenegro, and not to the citizens, we have the right to doubt that these funds have been abused for election purposes.

We also proposed an obligation for the Government to submit semi-annual reports on the budget execution to the Parliament, as well as to provide information on the realization of the obligations defined in the contracts on the rescheduling of tax debt of municipalities and of contracts, which regulate relations between the State and municipalities based on credit indebtedness with the state guarantee.

Furthermore, we have asked the Government to prepare comprehensive information on obstacle for the establishment and operation of the budgetary inspection with the proposal of urgent measures, as well as to prepare information elaborating reasons for delays in establishing the registry of state property, in both electronic and hard copy formats. Ten years after the law prescribed obligation of establishing the registry of state property, it remains unknown how much movable and immovable property Montenegro owns.

In order for the public to have a better insight into public procurement spending, we proposed the obligation to make a report on confidential procurements. We believe that this would not jeopardize the secrecy of confidential procurement in the security sector; on the other hand, citizens would have an insight into the number of bids submitted and the procedures applied.

We also proposed the adoption of the Law on Amendments to the Law on the Special State Prosecutor’s Office in order to improve the semi-annual and annual reporting on the work of this body by envisaging a special part with an individual overview of the workload of each special prosecutor and with information on dismissed criminal charges per applicant.

We believe that it is important to adopt bi-annual and annual reports on the implementation of recommendations addressed to specific institutions on the basis of the assessments in the European Commission’s Non-Paper on Chapter 23 (Judiciary and Fundamental Rights), in order to enable credible monitoring of the implementation of these recommendations.

We also proposed amendments to the Law on Prevention of Corruption. We believe that a four-year ban on the performance of a public function by a public official, who violates this law, should be extended also to those officials who resign due to the similar law breaches. We also asked for the establishment of a working group led by the Ministry of Justice with the representatives of the Police Directorate, the Supreme Court, the State Prosecutor’s Office, the Prosecutorial Council and the Judicial Council, in order to harmonize the statistics of these bodies and thus facilitate monitoring of performance of these institutions vis-à-visobligations stemming from Chapters 23 and 24.

Government also refused to incorporate adoption of the Information on the work of the Housing Commission of the Government of Montenegro, the Report on the Implementation of the Law on Public Gatherings and Public Events, in this year’s programme. Preparation of the Law on Amendments to the Law on Personal Data Protection was also rejected, even though these amendments would regulate the right of access to the verdicts against public officials, without prior consent of the public official concerned.

Team of Institute Alternative

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Realised activities within the project You4EU – Citizen participation 2.0

Dragana Jaćimović, project associate at Institute Alternative, presented activities that have been implemented so far within the “You4EU – Citizen participation 2.0” project, for the TV Show NGO sector.

During the past period, within the first phase of the project “You4EU – Citizen participation 2.0”, citizens were able to post questions on the social media networks regarding the current issues on the European union.

She pointed out that citizens had chance to post questions on social media networks – Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and these questions were addressed  to the representatives of competent institutions.

Check the feature and find out what topics were most interesting for citizens, what are the most frequently asked questions, and what are the planned activities for the next period:

 

 

Project “You4EU – Citizen participation 2.0” is being implemented by Institute Alternative, in partnership with Belgrade Open School (Serbia), GONG (Croatia), PINA (Slovenia) and Access Info Europe (Spain). This project is funded  by the European Union, within the  programme Europe for citizens.