Today we have presented the key findings and recommendations of the IA’s new policy paper entitled “Committee for Anticorruption – Cure or Placebo?”.
Policy paper is a result of project financed by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Foundation and is a part of permanent Institutes activities on strenghtening the parliamentary oversight role. Speakers at the press conference were Milena Milosevic and Marko Sosic, public policy researchers. Please, find key findings and recommendations below.
Key research findings:
Competences of the Committee for Anticorruption leave a room for an extensive interpretation. The manner in which they will be applied in practice will provide an answer to the question whether this working body will “be repeating” tasks that have been already assigned to other bodies, or whether it will substantially contribute to the fight against corruption and organized crime through the monitoring of the implementation of legislation and strategies, intensive use of control mechanisms, evaluation of the current legislation and other legislative initiatives.
Key recommendations:
- Committee should be enabled to assume active role in the development of action plans and strategies prior to their adop¬tion by the Government, for the purpose of exercising greater influence on their final version and a more efficient oversight over their implementation.
Oversight of the Government’s activities in the fight against corrup¬tion and organized crime, as well as of the accession negotiations with the EU, could be reinforced by introducing the obligation of quarterly reporting to the Committee on the implementation of the action plan(s) for the fight against corruption and orga¬nized crime.
Government’s Decision should extend the composition of the National Commission to include the President of the Committee for Anticorruption.
The cooperation mechanisms between the Committee for Anticorruption and the National Commission should be enhanced, in a manner which would ensure that the actions of the Committee’s representative are grounded on conclusions and recom¬mendations that have been previously agreed on the Committee’s meetings.
Records on the number of Committee’s recommendations, which are adopted at the sessions of the National Commission and implemented in practice, should be kept.
The Law on Data Confidentiality should be amended in order to provide the members of the new Committee the access to the confidential data.
The Committee’s capacities for carrying out the evaluation of the legislative frame-work with regard to its compliance with the international standards in the fight against corruption and organized crime should be strengthened, by ensuring full support from the professional service and the Parliament’s Department for research, analysis, library and documentation.
For the purpose of improving the anticor¬ruption provisions in the laws, the mem-bers of the Committee for Anticorruption should insist on the joint consideration of the proposals and draft laws with other competent permanent parliamentary working bodies that operate in a capacity of the parent Committees. Based on a special Rulebook, the mem¬bers of the Committee should define the procedures for petitions’ admission and consideration.
The aforementioned Rulebook should define the minimum criteria to be met by any petition submitted by an individual or a group, including anonymous petitions, for the purpose of being addressed at the Committee’s Sessions.
Procedure of considering the petitions by the Committee should be public, in terms of publication of petitions, responses of authorities, and the decision of the Committee brought after the consideration of each application, which has previously met certain criteria, on the web – site of the Parliament.
Professional service is obliged to submit a corresponding justification to the petition¬ers who fail to meet pre- defined criteria.
