The Government limited access to public information to citizens of Montenegro through prescription of unrealistically high costs of the proceedings, contrary to the Law on free access to information.
The Government has adopted the Decree on cost compensation relating to access to information held by public authorities which contains a number of provisions contrary to the Law on free access to information. That Decree stipulates that citizens who seek information from the Government agencies and public companies have to pay twice the cost for copying comparing to the cost in the private copy places, although the Law stipulates that the charge can only be imposed for the actual costs.
In other words, the Law obliges the Government to charge the citizens only for actual costs, and in practice the Government to the detriment of the citizens earns more than double comparing to private copy places for which that is the only source of profit.
In this way, the Government creates additional obstacles for citizens who want to control it and use their right to access the data.
Moreover, in practice, this Government’s Decree is greatly abused in order to hide information that the public has a right to know by imposing ridiculous high costs of the proceedings.
For example, the Electric Power Industry of Montenegro, which makes enormous extra profits at the expense of citizens, and for information that should itself publish on the Internet, charges extremely expensive. So, only in the last three years EPIM asked for more than 10,000 euros for publishing information of public interest.
A similar example is the Central Registry of the Commercial Court, which is now led by the Tax Administration. Namely, that register contains data on companies and based on the law these information must be made available to the public. However, in the last three years, the Registry has sought almost 4,000 euros to publish information that similar institutions in other countries regularly publish on their Internet sites. In that way they tried to restrict us access to information on companies whose owners are public officials or individuals linked to organized crime, instead of published those data as an official duty.
Bearing in mind the importance of transparency in fighting corruption and organized crime, and the fact that the right of access to information is recognized in the Constitution of Montenegro, we ask the Government to adopt a new Decree, in accordance with the law and thus enable citizens to actually exercise their rights.
Otherwise, access to information in Montenegro will obviously be a luxury for any average citizen, even though it represents one of the fundamental rights of every person, whose fulfillment should be provided by the Government of Montenegro.
MANS
