Civic Alliance: Police have terminated civilian oversight of the treatment of arrested persons

The Police Directorate has refused to extend key provisions of the memorandum of cooperation with the Civic Alliance, which, through regular monitoring and unannounced visits to security departments and police premises where persons deprived of their liberty are held, provided independent insight into the treatment of these persons, announced the NGO's program director Milan Radović.

"This is a mechanism established in 2015, which functioned for eleven years without a single obstacle, through several different leaderships of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Police Administration, and which resulted in a large number of reports on the current situation in security departments and the treatment of police officers towards persons deprived of their liberty. This turn of events in itself speaks volumes about the direction in which the Police Administration is moving, towards closing down the system to the detriment of human rights and the collapse of what has been carefully built over the years," the statement reads.

The memorandum that last formalized this cooperation, he recalls, was signed in May 2021 with the Ministry of the Interior and the Police Directorate and was formally valid until May 31 of this year.

"The current Director of the Police Directorate was appointed Acting Director in December 2024, and was elected Director for a full term on December 27, 2025. For a full year and a half, until the expiration of the Memorandum, we carried out unannounced visits and other activities from this part of the cooperation without any hindrance, while Šćepanović was already leading the Police Directorate. After the expiration of the Memorandum, we addressed the signatories with a request to extend cooperation, and instead of the expected extension, we received an official response that the provisions on which the Memorandum is based are unacceptable to the Police Directorate," Radović said.

He says that the Civic Alliance responded to that response with a letter in which they explained in detail why the argument presented, in the opinion of the NGO, has no legal basis and proposed a meeting to discuss the controversial issues. He points out that they have not received an official response and that, after eleven years of cooperation, this "honestly surprises" them.

"As a reason for the refusal, the Police Directorate states that independent control mechanisms already exist, the CPT and the Protector of Human Rights and Freedoms through the work of the National Preventive Mechanism. Neither of these two mechanisms, however, was created in 2026; both existed at the time when cooperation with the Civic Alliance was established, as well as during the entire period of its uninterrupted functioning. Neither the Constitution nor the Law on Internal Affairs, to which the Police Directorate refers, contain a provision that would make this type of cooperation legally unacceptable. On the contrary, the United Nations Subcommittee on the Prevention of Torture, the body responsible for interpreting the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, took the position back in 2010 that there should be no exclusivity in preventive action and that the role of national preventive mechanisms is supported and supplemented by civil society. The engagement of non-governmental organizations in the supervision of places of deprivation of liberty is not an exception in the rest of Europe, it is a recognized and supported model of good practice," Radović points out.

He said that the argumentation the Police Directorate is referring to "does not hold up."

"The extent to which independent oversight is still necessary is clearly demonstrated by the findings our team made last year in Bijelo Polje, which we then publicly announced. During an unannounced visit to the Security Department, which is also the headquarters of the Regional Security Center North, we found the detention facilities in a completely unfit condition for residence, with destroyed furniture, dilapidated infrastructure, and hygienic conditions below every prescribed minimum. It is precisely thanks to our unannounced visit that this finding became available to the public," Radović notes.

He also says that the Civic Alliance team, in addition to the tours themselves, has documented cases of torture for years, many of which have had an epilogue in court and resulted in final convictions for police officers.

"Among them is the case of the brutal beating of Mio Martinović in 2021, which our team documented in the field at the time and was the first to publicly announce. During the same period, we also recorded twenty-four other cases of abuse of authority and abuse, and during the entire decade of work, dozens of similar cases throughout Montenegro. The same applies to the riots in Cetinje in 2021, on the eve of the enthronement, when none of the other oversight mechanisms that Šćepanović refers to were present on the ground, and when our team visited the Cetinje Security Department and spoke with persons deprived of their liberty. Through all these cases, as well as through regular monitoring, we monitored and recorded what the National Preventive Mechanism, due to its workload and limited capacities, was not always able to follow up in real time. In this sense, we were its extended arm, and we regularly and promptly informed the Police Directorate about all findings," he points out.

Radović said that the temporal and substantive context of this decision cannot be ignored.

"In addition to pointing out the current situation in the Bijelo Polje Police Station, the Civic Alliance has publicly criticized the Law on Internal Affairs, especially the provisions on the commission for determining security obstacles, which denies police officers assessed as a "security risk" the right to defense in regular disciplinary proceedings, a law that was publicly defended at the time by the current director of the Police Directorate. The validity of these warnings was later confirmed by the Agency for the Prevention of Corruption, and the amendment of the disputed provisions is also part of the recently signed agreement between the government and the opposition. In light of this chronology, it is up to the Police Directorate to explain to the public why a practice that was acceptable for eleven years, and which did not pose a problem to any previous leadership, suddenly became unacceptable," said Radović.

From all of the above, he said, it follows that the internal affairs system is closing down to the detriment of the human rights of persons deprived of their liberty, "precisely at a time when our findings show that independent oversight is more necessary than ever."

"We will inform the CPT, the European Union delegation, the Council of Europe and the OSCE, partners with whom we have been cooperating for years on improving the human rights situation in Montenegro, about all of the above. These institutions have, through numerous programs and recommendations, invested for decades in building such mechanisms of cooperation between the civil sector and the police and have a legitimate interest in being informed of the circumstances in which one of the successful examples of such cooperation in the region is being terminated. We maintain our assessment that there is no real need to change the practice that has functioned well for eleven years, and that the decision to end this cooperation was made far outside the legal and professional framework. Accordingly, the Civic Alliance will continue to insist on the full renewal of the Memorandum," the statement reads.