The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection has received a letter of apology from the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF), by which the NHIF notified him of the measures and activities it had undertaken and those it intended to undertake following the Letter of Warning sent to it by the Commissioner in connection with inadmissible processing of personal data.
Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection views yesterday’s behaviour of member of parliament Marjan Rističević in the National Assembly as primitive, based on fabrications and unacceptable.
The Commissioner does not wish to comment on the rude remarks, which are so typical of this member of parliament, or to speculate about his motives. However, for the sake of the public, he feels he must comment on the claim that the Commissioner and the Protector of Citizens allegedly “received 80,000 euros from the United Kingdom and who knows how they spent them” and have been “enemies of the Serbian Government ever since.”
These insinuations relate to a project implemented by the Commissioner from grants by the British and Dutch embassies almost four years ago, from which neither the Commissioner nor the Protector of Citizens nor any of the employees in the institutions which they represent received a single dinar.
It was the project “Whistleblower Protection in Serbia”, which involved the engagement of numerous individuals over many months and numerous activities to examine the treatment of whistleblowers, to affirm the need for their protection and, finally, to develop a Model Law on Whistleblower Protection, which Serbia did not have at the time.
The project was very successful, not only in the opinion of the donors, but also according to a number of independent experts. For this reason, the international global network Transparency International asked and obtained access to the project from the Commissioner.
The Model Law was made available to the Government of Serbia, specifically the Ministry of Justice; however, they chose to spend budget funds to draft a different model, which resulted in the enactment of the Law on Whistleblower Protection two years later.
Both donors made available a total sum of EUR 94,330.25 for project implementation purposes. The Commissioner did not withdraw the full available amount; instead, he withdrew only EUR 80,330.79. Eventually, even these withdrawn funds were not fully spent, so the remaining amount of EUR 3,667.69 was returned to the donors.
The Financial Execution Report is available for download here.
In this context, Commissioner Rodoljub Šabić said:
The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection welcomes the latest amendments to the Regulation on Office Operations recently passed by the Government. The new amendments eliminate the dilemmas faced by many after the previous amendments to the Regulation on Office Operations. Those previous amendments, including in particular paragraph 3 of Article 10, which introduced the marking “official”, caused many to suspect it was nothing more than an effort to illegally introduce a new classification level and restrict freedom of information. For example, based on this assumption, the Anti-Corruption Council of the Government of Serbia filed a motion for a constitutional and legal review with the Constitutional Court.
In a letter sent to the ad
Reports on compliance with the Law on Free Access to Information is a duty of government authorities
dresses of the highest government authorities, all Ministries and hundreds of other authorities, the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection reminded them of their duty under Article 43 of the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance, under which all government authorities, territorial autonomy bodies, local self-government bodies and organisations with delegated public powers have a duty to submit an annual report on the activities undertaken to ensure compliance with that Law.
The Commissioner also warned the authorities that failure to submit such reports is a punishable infringement under Article 48 of the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance.
The reports of government authorities, which are due by the 20th of January next year, serve as the basis for compiling the annual report on the current situation in the fields of free access to information of public importance and personal data protection, which the Commissioner submits to the National Assembly and forwards to the President of the Republic, the Government and the Protector of Citizens in March every year in respect of the preceding year.
In connection with this, Commissioner Rodoljub Šabić said:
