The State Election Commission and its president, Budimir Saranovic, are brutally violating the Law on Free Access to Information and the Law on Election of Councillors and Members of Parliament, as they have been hiding from the public basic information on the work of the SEC in the period since the parliamentary elections were called, when it is particularly important to keep the Commission’s work transparent.
MANS has requested the SEC, in accordance with the Law on Free Access to Information, to deliver all of the reports that the Commission made while overseeing the electoral register. Instead of submitting the requested information, the SEC ignored the request, so MANS has filed a complaint to the Agency for Protection of Personal Data and the Free Access to Information.
MANS’s request for minutes of the SEC’s sessions, payroll of the SEC’s members and employees, as well as the information on activities of the president and the secretary, who are the only professionally employed members of the institution and get very high salaries for their work, had the same treatment by the SEC.
Thus, the president of the SEC, Budimir Saranovic, as well as the whole commission, brutally violated the Law on Free Access to Information. The fact that Saranovic does not want to deliver basic information on the work of the SEC shows an effort to cover perennial lack of results in the SECs attempt to ensure free and fair elections in Montenegro. This is particularly evident in the area of overseeing the electoral register, as the SEC has not even once for the whole time pointed at an irregularity, nor had any initiatives towards the Ministry of Interior in terms of inspecting the electoral register. Despite the fact that the new register was established over a year and a half ago, the results of Saranovic and his commission in the field of monitoring is worth nothing.
Not only is Saranovic breaking the Law on Free Access to Information and hiding basic information on the work of the SEC, but he is also violating the Law on Election of Councillors and Members of Parliament, which obliges him to ensure transparent work of the SEC and publish all the acts and data relevant to the election process on the website, which the SEC has failed to do continuously.
Therefore, Montenegrin citizens do not have an elementary insight into the SECs efforts to ensure adequate oversight of the electoral register, nor the SEC’s decisions made at its sessions and with regard to other electoral actions, nor how the SEC plans to ensure a more legal and transparent election process.
We urge the Agency for Protection of Personal Data to urgently ensure that the requested data are published, and to process the president of the SEC, Budimir Saranovic, as it is obviously the only way to ensure transparent and lawful work of the SEC.
Vuk Maras
Monitoring Program Director
