The Government of Montenegro at yesterday’s session, although it was not on the agenda, de facto dismissed current Operational Team for Open Government Partnership (OGP), bringing a new Decision on the establishment of the Operational Team Partnership for Open Government, which foresees the election of new members within 30 days of the entry into force of the Decision.
The members of this working bodies from civil society before that were not even informed that their mandate will suddenly stop and that representatives of NGOs will be re-elected by public tender. Controversial decisions that the Government yesterday adopted was never discussed in the sessions of the Operative Team, and after multiple queries toward the coordinator of the Operational team we were deprived of the information who has made this decision and proposed to the Government for approval, actually who took the decision to dismiss the existing Operational Team.
The only thing that the members of the Operational Team of the civil sector received in an inarticulate way explains that such a decision had to be made in order to provide full legal preconditions for the undisturbed operation of the Operations Team, and that the intention of the Government was not supposed to dismiss members of civil society.
Over the past six months, representatives of the Centre for Civic Education (CCE), Centre for Democratic Transition (CDT), the Institute Alternative (IA) and the Network for Affirmation of Non-Governmental Sector (MANS) as volunteers worked in this working group on the drafting of the Action Plan for improvements in the field of improving public services, increasing public integrity, more efficient management of public resources, etc., advocating for serious measures to significantly alter the functioning of the state administration and suggested dozens of measures on the basis of which it was made the current draft version of the Action Plan of the Partnership for Open Government.
After the first version of the Action Plan was completed and the first public consultations carried out, the Government our work “deposited” on another month, until just before the finalization of the Action Plan. For this, an extremely inappropriate way, the Government has ensured that someone does the job, or that the civil sector proposes measures for the new Action Plan, and then ruled us out the work of the Operational Team just before the adoption of the Action Plan. In that way, we would not be able to influence the final content of the Action Plan, which would leave room to the Government to remove those measures most problematic in terms of political will, and that officially claims that the Action Plan was made in cooperation with civil society.
Not only that the Government in this way disabled us to influence the final look and content of the Action Plan for Partnership for Open Government, but also ensure that we can not keep track of the implementation of this Action Plan through the Operational Team.
OGP is a prestigious global initiative involving 64 countries in which it is required the cooperation of the Governments and civil society in preparing reforms that enhance transparency and accountability of the state administration.
Sincerely,
Boris Maric, CCE
Milica Kovacevic, CDT
Dina Bajramspahic, IA
Vuk Maras, MANS
