At the meeting held last week, representatives of Institute Alternative (IA), Dragana Jaćimović and Bojana Pravilović, presented IA proposals for improving the work of the Security and Defence Committee of the Parliament of Montenegro.
Institute Alternative has been monitoring the work of the Parliament and the Security and Defence Committee for years, so this was an opportunity to present some of our recommendations, such as the regular review of reports on the implementation of secret surveillance measures, and a control hearing on the functionality of the system for secure automatic data exchange aimed at combating crime.
We emphasised that the automatic exchange of data is a recommendation of the European Commission that has been repeated year after year, but we also pointed out that the Special State Prosecutor’s Office still does not have access to all databases. We highlighted that we believe it is important for this issue to be addressed at a session of the Security and Defence Committee in order to assess the current situation and identify any obstacles to the automatic data exchange between institutions that are signatories to the 2021 Agreement on Enhancing Cooperation in Crime Prevention.
Additionally, we stressed the need for the Committee to hold a consultative hearing on the personnel policy of the Police Directorate, particularly considering that the Ministry of Interior has not prepared a Personnel Plan for the past three years, and projections regarding the number of officers eligible for retirement are not publicly available. This hearing is crucial because personnel management in the Police Directorate is part of two separate strategic documents: the “Police Directorate Development Strategy for the period 2023-2026” and the “Human Resources Management Strategy in the Police Directorate 2019-2024.” The Committee should review the report on the implementation of activities from these strategies for the previous year and assess to what extent the measures proposed by the Government align with the earlier strategic priorities.
During the meeting, we also recalled the key findings from the analysis “Parliamentary Oversight of the Security Sector and the Process of European Integration,” pointing out the insufficient use of mechanisms such as institutional visits, requesting special reports, and reviewing laws and strategic documents in the field of security and defence.
