Source: Pregled

Showed Informer about working of Chamber of the Economy in Serbia

Ljiljana Lukic

Belgrade

The best way to trust some Institution is to offer some information nobody asked for. In Serbia the problem is exactly the lack of information, which is shown by the fact that we have no idea what is going on with 8 percent of BDP, because of 12.000 participants in public consumption just 2.000 of them submit their yearly reports, stated yesterday at the Chamber of the Economy in Serbia (PKS), Commissioner to the information of the public importance of the Government of Serbia, Rodoljub Sabic.

Source: Danas

Free access to the information in the Law and practice

Personal attitude

Not so long ago the Association of the Journalists in Serbia, by the repeated request to the Government of Serbia to render certain execution of one decision of Commissioner for the information, reminded public on one, already forgotten, bizarre event. In the mentioned event, few months ago, the journalist, who tried to film the  „clinic“, which was built, without the building permission, begin at the property of one Minister, was physically attacked. Minister „explained“ that the journalist was attacked because he was sexually molesting Minister's sheep, about what, as he said, there is a police report. This kind of explanation, both Association of journalist, UNS and NUNS, marked as tuff lie and serious insult, not just to this exact journalist, but also to whole journalist profession.

Source: Blic

Rodoljub Sabic, Commissioner for Information

Recently, like every year in March, the Commissioner for Information submitted to the Assembly of Serbia the annual report on the enforcement of the Law on Free Access to Information. Like the previous report, this one will also confirm that the right to free access to information is used more and more, on a continuous basis. The number of requests for the access to information submitted to different levels of the authorities is 50 per cent higher than in the previous year and around 4.5 times higher than in 2005. Around 30 per cent more cases were worked upon and resolved at the Commissioner's office than during the last year. Also, the relation of the authorities towards some formal obligations, such as the submission of reports, publishing of the Informer on the work done and the education of the human resources is somewhat better.

Source: Danas

Personal position

The pre-election campaign is getting into a full swing. We shall have more and more opportunities to face different concepts, programmes and ideas of the participants in the campaign, whose subject is fight against corruption. It is logical, even inevitable, that it reminds us that the free access to the information of public importance, as one of the forms of the democratic control of the public over the authorities, can give extremely good results in the fight against corruption. The possibility of achieving such results is not a supposition, but a reality, confirmed in an effective and remarkable way through the experience of some successful countries in transition, such as Slovenia, Estonia or Slovakia.  

Source: Blic

Rodoljub Sabic, Commissioner for Information

It is a fact well known that the Law on Free Access to Information does not recognize the situation categorized in some other proceedings as silence of administration and even treats it as a mere infringement. And yet, of more than 1,160 appeals on which the Commissioner for Information ruled in 2007, as many as 96 percent pertained exactly to such ignoring of requests. This means that only 4 percent of those who decided to deny the public its right enshrined in the Constitution and the law did so by passing a reasoned decision, i.e. in a manner which is, justified or otherwise, at least formally correct. It is hard to find a proper excuse for this. 

Source: Blic

Freedom of information includes of necessity both an active and a passive component.  The former, of course, implies an obligation of the government to grant proper treatment to all requests for free access to information submitted by citizens, journalists, media, NGOs, political parties - the public in general.  The latter, however, implies something more - an obligation for the government to provide the public with as much information as possible on what it does and how it does it before someone actually requests it. Even if the government complies with this second obligation (and it is well known how extremely problematic this can be in our country), it is not irrelevant how exactly it does that. Marshall McLuhan, a famous media theorist, rightly said that even the choice of media through which information is conveyed to someone is in fact very important information.