The Administrative Court of Montenegro has passed a judgement according to which parliamentary parties are bound by the Law on Free Access to Information, with the rationale that they are legal entities whose work is largely financed from public revenues. The court annulled the decision of the Agency for Protection of Personal Data and Free Access to Information and pointed out that in a number of proceedings this body had previously adopted decisions through which it had ordered political parties to act in accordance with requests for access to information, so, as the judgement states, it is “unclear what was the basis for deviation from the previous practice of that body”.
In the rationale for the judgement of the Administrative Court it is stated that, pursuant to the Article 9 of the Law on Free Access to Information, entities having the status of a legal person and largely financed from public revenues, are in this court’s opinion obliged to act in accordance with the requests for access to information. “In accordance with applicable regulations, political parties acquire the status of a legal entity by being registered in the Register of Political Parties (Article 6 of the Law on Political Parties), and the funds for their operation and election campaigns can be obtained from public and private sources (Article 3 of the Law on Financing Political Entities and Election Campaigns)”, the rationale for the judgement states.
The proceedings before the Administrative Court have been initiated by MANS after the Agency started submitting decisions to this non-governmental organization pursuant to which parliamentary parties were not obliged to comply with the Law on Free Access to Information. This change occurred after the Special Prosecution initiated an investigation into suspicious donations to DPS, on the basis of information MANS obtained by relying on the Law on Free Access to Information. Thus, this “independent body”, while that same Law was in force, suddenly decided to change the practice of enforcing it, although in the previous 152 instances it provided a positive opinion on the same requests.
Through the aforementioned decisions, the Agency has allowed the parties to hide the information about their finances from the public for a certain period of time. This is especially relevant given that the requested information on party finances relates to the period of the presidential and local election campaigns.
The Law on Free Access to Information is currently the only legal act that imposes full transparency of party finances in Montenegro, and by exempting certain entities from this Law the Agency tried to legitimize data hiding, obstructing the whole concept of party finance transparency, but also to open up a broad space for further expansion of political corruption in electoral campaigns.
