Institut Alternative (IA) today submitted an initiative to the Minister of Interior, Mr Goran Danilović, aimed at improving Draft Law on Amendments to the Law on Civil Servants and State Employees, which keeps problematic legal solutions and prevents establishing of merit based system in state authorities.
Work on amending the Law on Civil Servants and State Employees began in September last year, and now, inter- sectoral Working Group, consisting of representatives of Ministry of Interior (MoI), Human Resources Management Authority (HRMA), Ministry of Finance (MF), Parliament of Montenegro and a representative of IA, is finalising the Draft Law.
However, despite our efforts to amend the provisions that, in previous period, have prevented establishing of merit – based system in Montenegrin state administration, Draft Law kept the most problematic solutions.
Those solutions that we pointed out in our initiative, include, among other things, discretionary right of the head of the authority not to appoint the best ranked candidate, insufficiently regulated evaluation of candidates, insufficient prevention of political influence over employees in state administration, centralized decision-making on appointment of civil servants and state employees in political figures and imprecise classification of work places.
Numerous findings of IA speak for problematic implementation of these legal solutions, but also experiences of citizens who file complaints via our website My administration. In initiative, we pointed to last complaint submitted via our website, where an ex employee of MoI claims that his rights were violated more than once.
“We remind that the Ministry you are heading is the most numerous institution of the system, with 4859 employees, according to the latest Government’s Personnel Plan. Thus, problem of violation of employees’ rights also mostly refers to MoI”, writes in the initiative.
We also reminded of our previous warnings that some of the MoI’s practices could be discriminatory, bearing in mind that the status of their fixed-term employees was solved by allowing them to apply for job based on internal announcements within Ministry.
“By doing so, a lot of others fixed-term employees in other state authorities are being discriminated, because they were not allowed to solve their working status in this manner”, states the initiative, and appeals to the Minister to investigate these media statements, but also the Government’s intention from 2013 to favor certain candidates, by prejudicing the outcome of job vacancies in this institution.
The initiative in its entirety can be read on the following link
IA Team
