MPs considered the 2025 Report on the Work of the Ministry of Defence in a “secure room”, thus departing from the established practice of opening this part of the Committee meeting to the public. Although the report had been available on the Government’s website since late March, the public was denied access to the discussion and given no insight into questions raised or views expressed by MPs.
At the 50th meeting of the Security and Defence Committee, held on Friday, 17 July, the Committee considered the Report on the Work of the Ministry of Defence and the Report on the State of the Armed Forces for 2025. Both reports were deliberated in a “secure room”, reserved reviews of classified documents. Until this year, reports on the work of the Ministry of Defence were discussed during the open parts of Committee meetings. By contrast, reports on the state of the Armed Forces were considered behind closed doors to protect classified information. This arrangement allowed the work of the Ministry of Defence to be subjected to public parliamentary scrutiny, while sensitive aspects of the Armed Forces’ work remained outside the public domain.
Rather than dividing the meeting into open and closed parts – allowing the public to follow the general findings, assessments and conclusions, while confidential matters were considered behind closed doors – the practice has shifted towards treating reports on the work of the Ministry of Defence in their entirety under a restricted-access regime. This approach is paradoxical, given that the report itself is not classified and is publicly available on the Government of Montenegro’s website. To note, neither the reports on the work of the Ministry of Defence nor the reports on the state of the Armed Forces have been published on the Parliament’s website.
Closing Committee meetings to the public points to a broader challenge concerning the transparency of parliamentary oversight of the defence sector. Although certain information relating to Armed Forces personnel, operational capabilities or security-sensitive matters may justify restricting public access, the decision to fully exclude the public from the review process raises questions about the proportionality of such a measure.
Reports on the state of the Armed Forces of Montenegro have not always been classified. With the exception of the report for 2015, all such reports covering the period from 2012 to 2018 are available on the Government’s website. The practice of classifying these reports began with the report for 2019. Since then, none has been made publicly available or presented in an open session of the competent Security and Defence Committee.
The Law on Parliamentary Oversight of the Security and Defence Sector stipulates that meetings of the Security and Defence Committee are “as a rule closed to the public” unless the Committee decides otherwise. Since 2012, Institute Alternative has maintained that this provision is inconsistent with the Rules of Procedure of the Parliament, which permit parliamentary committee meetings to be closed to the public only when classified materials are under consideration.
This poses a particular challenge to democratic oversight of the security sector, as parliamentary scrutiny extends beyond formal consideration of reports; it also requires that the public be informed of the principal findings, as well as the questions raised and responses provided during exchanges between MPs and representatives of the institutions concerned. The boundary between the protection of legitimate security interests and the need to ensure transparency in institutions subject to democratic civilian oversight should therefore be defined more clearly.
Stevo Muk
President of the Managing Board