Year: 2021

Gender-sensitive legislation is a starting point for gender gap elimination. This analysis assesses the extent of gender perspective integration in the drafting of laws regulating labour relations, companies and health insurance. Although consideration of the potential impacts of policies on the positions of women and men is obligatory, that statutory obligation has been disregarded. This is illustrated by the Labour Law envisaging, due to the pressure exerted by the employers, that women employed on short-term contracts who take pregnancy-related sick leave would not have that period count towards the 36-month term required to obtain an open-ended contract i.e. permanent employment.

The institutional set-up for gender mainstreaming is deficient. Due to the lack of human and technical resources, the Gender Equality Division within the line Ministry is unable to issue opinions to all proposed legislation. The Gender Equality Council held only two meetings during the four-year term. During the term of the former Parliament, the Gender Equality Committee, as the concerned working body, issued opinions to fourteen proposals for laws, some of which largely influenced the position of women, such as the Proposal for the Law Amending the Law on Health Insurance. Although the Action Plan for the Gender Sensitive Parliament was adopted in 2019, there has been no monitoring of its implementation and the key objectives related to gender mainstreaming have not been achieved.

Targeted early stakeholder consultations (javne konsultacije) and full-scale public consultations (javne rasprave) aiming to collect data that would essentially respond to the need for reduced gender gap are lacking; gender gap is most evident in the domains of labour, power and money, and health. There is no advanced and gender-disaggregated statistics to serve as the basis for policy adoption and monitoring. For instance, there is no reliable statistics on the gender pay gap. The key stages in policy making are not adequately regulated, in particular with regard to the interventions following the completion of public consultations.

Organised crime and corruption are common problems in all Western Balkan countries. Considering that Montenegro has had the same ruling party for almost 30 years, and that the 2020 Freedom House Report rated it as a transitional or hybrid regime, it is no wonder that numerous international and domestic reports are citing that this political environment did not contribute to the fight against OC. Although small, Montenegro is known as a country in which the war between cocaine clans has escalated, where journalists who investigated such cases have been attacked, and as a country that has a serious problem with organised crime. Civil society organisations (CSOs) in Montenegro are recognised as a very important part of society, but those that were critical of the existing problems were often characterised by the Government as “enemies of the state”.

This analysis is the result of qualitative research aimed at presenting the efforts of CSOs in fighting OC and corruption. As Montenegro is not a big country, the number of CSOs focused on the fight against OC and corruption is small. This is why the research included organisations whose domain of work in the area of fight against corruption and OC is much broader, and whose activities tackle this problem directly or indirectly. There are very few organisations that deal strictly with OC, for reasons of complexity and sensitivity of the topic itself, among other things. The profiles of organisations included in the research encompass those that fight against OC and corruption by conducting watchdog activities, engage in investigative journalism and crime prevention, as well as those that provide victim support and offer education. The IA research team has conducted in-depth interviews with representatives of seven such organisations, and has found that the work of most of them is related to victim support.

It is difficult to improve the practice in the Montenegrin public procurement system when the “rules of the game” keep changing. The penultimate day of 2019 brought the new Public Procurement Law (PPL), which introduced a number of new rules, along with a timeline of only six months for the players to master those.

The new rules impacted also the security sector; however, the Government Decree on the list of military equipment and products, procedure and method of conducting public procurement in the fields of defence and security limited the arbitrary actions of contracting authorities only to a certain extent. The system of planning and reporting on these procurements was not significantly improved. Planning was not tied to the strategic objectives in the security and defence sector, while security procurements were envisaged to be reported only to the Ministry of Finance. Other oversight instances, such as the National Security Council, and in particular the Parliamentary Security and Defence Committee, were not integrated in the oversight system.

According to the publicly available annual reports on public procurement, four institutions, namely the Ministry of Interior (MoI), Police Administration (PA), Ministry of Defence (MoD) and National Security Agency (NSA), spent in aggregate close to €30 million on public procurement in 2018, while the MoI alone spent as much in 2019. The four institutions’ total spending on public procurement in 2019 amounted to close to €42.5 million. It usually remains unknown, however, what share of that amount referred to security procurement, or if any additional amounts were spent. No specific reports are prepared on this segment of spending.

During the three-year legal vacuum brought about by the 2017 amendments to the PPL, due to the incomplete and ambiguous regulatory framework, the contracting authorities conducted procurement in a hybrid fashion: they applied the open procedure, while classifying some data, such as technical specifications, contracts and such. The contracting authorities continued to conduct public procurement in such a manner even after the adoption of the new Law and Decree, which had a negative impact on the remedies system.

The NSA remains the most secretive institution in the security and defence system – not only was their spending on security procurement a secret, but so was also the relevant regulation. That leaves the State Audit Institution (SAI) as the only witness of any irregularities concerning the spending on security procurement. SAI’s audits in the security sector are not frequent enough.