(Podgorica, 09 may 2013.) Today a hearing in the retrial regarding the illegitimacy of the agreement between the Police Directorate and M-Tel was supposed to be held. The case was brought before the courts by MANS given the total access given to the police by this telecommunications company about its users. The hearing was delayed since the summons for M-Tel appears not to have been delivered.
Since August 2011, the President of the High Court in Podgorica, on the basis of a request made by the prosecutor (after an unacceptable delay), ruled that this case needs to be prioritized and completed. However, when the lower court made a final ruling, then the High Court and its president unduly delayed the proceedings by not addressing the police’s appeal of the verdict, which had found the agreement in question null and void.
For this reason, prosecutors submitted a new request to expedite the process of the High Court in Podgorica this past September (2012). However, in spite of having previously confirmed the urgency of the matter, the President of the court failed to act on the new request. For this reason we submitted a complaint to the Appellate Court in Montenegro. The President of the Appellate Court took our complaint into consideration and ruled that the subject needs to be considered within 15 days.
We note for the public that the president of the Appellate Court of Montenegro in her ruling pointed out that the High Court of Podgorica’s judge Snezana Vukcevic could have finished all the cases she took over from 2011 within the first half of the year.
In spite of considerable irregularities, Judge Vukcevic wasn’t held to account through disciplinary measures, claiming that she annulled the lower courts decision in the police case on the basis of the absurd claim that access to the data is controlled because the police keep personal data in a separate electronic archive!? Thus, Vukcevic is effectively claiming that personal data is protected from police abuses by the very fact that the police keeps the data of operators in an electronic file.
We would like to remind Judge Vukcevic, as well as other judges dealing with this case, that citizens have the right to effective controls in cases where public authorities interfere with their privacy and other fundamental rights.
The behaviour of the courts in this case demonstrate that basic human rights are being violated in an organized fashion, and that instead of being a guarantee of their protection they permit and support their violation. Along with all of the above, the Constitutional Court has failed for the past five years to rule on the constitutionality of the provision in the Regulations on Criminal Proceedings that allows the police the ability to obtain citizen information without the need for a court order. Obviously, the reasons for such delays are not a mystery and the judges know the real reasons.
