The Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection has passed a Decision ordering the Serbian Ministry of Economy to provide the organization Transparency Serbia without delay, and in any case not later than three days of service of the Decision, a copy of the Management and Consulting Services Agreement entered into on 21 March 2015 between the Republic of Serbia, the company "Zelezara Smederevo"d.o.o. (Smederevo Ironworks Ltd) of Belgrade and HPK ENGINEERING B.V. of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

The Commissioner is of the opinion that the delegation of management duties relating to publicly-owned resources, especially if the resource concerned is of such value and importance as the Smederevo Ironworks, is a transaction that has quite understandably garnered much public interest and maintains that the public has a legitimate interest in accessing all pertinent information.

The Ministry has not provided evidence of any of the justified reasons provided for in Articles 9, 13 or 14 of the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance that could constitute grounds for denying access to the information contained in the requested document. Merely stating that the Agreement contained data the publication of which could harm the service provider, without providing any substantial proof or reasoning, most certainly does not constitute such grounds. Indeed, the Ministry appears to have ignored Article 26 paragraph 2 of the Law, which provides that, for fact-finding purposes, the Commissioner shall be granted access to any information storage medium subject to that Law, in that it refused to grant access to the said Agreement even to the Commissioner himself, which is an unprecedented action in the implementation of the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance to date.

The Commissioner would like to recall once again that the right of the public and citizens to access information held by public authorities is guaranteed by the Constitution of Serbia and is enjoyed – or in some circumstances restricted – under the conditions and in the manner provided for in the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance. Any attempt to thwart this by any commercial agreement with a foreign partner directly contravenes both the Law and the Constitution of Serbia. Nowhere in the world, including of course Serbia, is it possible to curtail rights guaranteed by a country's legal system by invoking contractual law.