In Montenegro, there is a legal framework that allows public administration to be open, but there is a lack of political will to improve and implement laws, according to Milena Muk, public policy researcher at the Institute of Alternatives, and Dejan Milovac, director of the Research Center of the Network for the Affirmation of the Non-Governmental Sector.
In an interview with the MINA agency, Muk said that it is not necessary to adopt new laws and strategies to make public administration more open, because they already exist.
"We have a Constitution that should limit the Government and the Assembly, but we see that it does not limit them. "Laws and strategies are important, but if you don't have elementary political responsibility, they are not part of the solution," Muk said.
She said that Montenegro has a solid strategy for public administration reform.
"The fiscal framework is here, we have been negotiating with the European Union (EU) for ten years. We have harmonized our normative framework to a large extent with EU standards. "The problem is not the lack of laws and strategies, but that they are not applied," said Muk.
She assessed that, after the change of government, there was no progress when it comes to the openness of public administration in Montenegro, i.e. that certain institutions are absolutely closed, or that certain information is selectively accessed.
As Muk said, sometimes they can boast of a proactive approach, but a smaller number of institutions.
"These are usually institutions that you would least expect to be open. From our experience, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Police Directorate, given that they are part of the security sector, were accommodating even before, before the change of government," Muk said, adding that public companies and institutions are at the back in terms of openness.
She said that the Government did not explain the scale of the cyber attack and that no assessment of the lost documentation due to that attack was done.
"The Montenegrin administration and politicians love excuses, and the cyber attack served them as the perfect excuse for a setback in proactively releasing information, while at the same time they did nothing to explain what they specifically did to remedy the consequences," Muk said.
She indicated that civil society organizations, immediately after the change of government, proposed amendments to the Law on Free Access to Information (FIA), with the aim of opening up the administration and information that they believed should be available to citizens, and that they were still waiting for these changes are on the agenda of the Assembly.
Milovac told the MINA agency that after the change of government in 2020, they had high expectations when it comes to free access to information, not only when submitting requests, but also proactively publishing them.
He added that society expected that the new government would be interested in showing citizens how certain privatizations took place, how the highway was financed and a whole series of affairs that existed only in media headlines and could not be further investigated.
"We did not succeed even by a millimeter to move the legal framework, to try to correct what was built into the existing law, which is actually an obstacle to free access to information, but we waited for the political will first of the administration of (Zdravko) Krivokapić, and now of (Dritan) Abazović Milovac said.
He said that this is not a surprise, because the law is essentially a powerful tool for controlling the government, "and no government likes to be controlled a lot."
According to Milovac, the cyber attack that took place last year further delayed the complete communication with state institutions.
"Everything you achieved as a standard in some non-paper communication, which accelerated access to information, was returned to the Stone Age and we had to do everything else again," Milovac said.
He assessed that in many areas, not only when it comes to free access to information, the new government adopted the model of behavior established by the previous one.
Milovac said that there were very creative excuses, where the cyber attack was cited as an excuse to the extent that the Minister of Justice was told that the text of the Law on the Confiscation of Assets Acquired by Crime could not be posted on the Government's website because of the cyber attack and because of the situation that the Minister could not the computer is working.
He said that there are positive examples when it comes to proactive publication - information on the spending of funds from the budget that has been sparingly communicated so far, as well as the fact that for the first time the Ministry of Finance proactively published statements from the treasury and budget reserves.
"It is a practice that was interrupted by the attacks, but it continues. "Unfortunately, this is not a practice adopted by some other institutions," Milovac said.
Muk stated that in the report of the European Commission for last year, the only step forward in transparency was the publication of budget transactions, with the fact that it is now quite unstructured.
"And what we recognized is the need to develop a special application that will allow interested citizens to search those budget transactions that the Government publishes, so that with certain filters and tools that we will develop, it will be even more accessible to the public," Muk added.
Speaking about information on social benefits, she said that there are several channels of social benefits and that they cannot be simplified, because not all of them are equally open or closed.
"The least transparency is definitely in relation to the allocation from the budget reserve, which practically goes to social protection, for the socially vulnerable. But you also have transfers from local administrations, ministries. Our experience in that domain is colorful," she added.
Muk believes that there must be an organized policy of opening the administration from the top.
Milovac stated that the Law is clear that certain information concerning the protection of the privacy of persons receiving social assistance must be protected, but that institutions often abuse this very provision.
According to him, the institutions then hide not only the name and surname of the person who received some kind of social assistance, but also the amounts.
"It is very dangerous, especially in the pre-election period, which Montenegro has very often", Milovac said and added that another problem is that there is no centralized system of social protection, but each budget unit has certain transfers to individuals and institutions.
He emphasized that even after the change of government, they could not get full information from the General Secretariat of the Government on where the state plane was flying, adding that they requested this information in every term of government both before and after 2020.
Muk said that it is not known what the ministries have done with their plan and that the Abazović government has a work program for this year, but it did not have one for the previous one.
"We had a mid-term work program of the Government of Zdravko Krivokapić, according to which they allegedly continued to work. We didn't have any quarterly reports on the implementation of the government's work program at all," said Muk, adding that a responsible government is expected to have a clear direction, a clear indicator, to be transparent in the implementation of those indicators and to inform the public about it.
The opening of the Government sessions, as she said, did not contribute to transparency.
"We still have closed parts of the session, without knowing what is discussed in them. "We don't know which points are marked with a certain degree of secrecy, so that we can then see if something justifies being marked as secret," said Muk.
Milovac said that the sessions of the Government are reduced to mutual praise of the ministers and the prime minister, without any essential contribution to transparency, while, on the other hand, the draft laws are determined at the telephone sessions.
"It is a huge problem that decisions are made during telephone sessions, but it is much bigger that, for example, systemic laws, especially those that fall into the corpus of anti-corruption laws, such as the Law on Confiscation of Assets, are passed without prior consultation and public debate," Milović pointed out.
He said that the people who are now the key brakemen of anti-corruption reforms, when it comes to laws on free access to information and the seizure of property, are the people who based a good part of their campaign on that.
"They were with the NGO and everything we did until 2020 and supported all that and promised from the opposition benches that, when they come to power, we will have a different practice," Milovac said. He added that he is afraid that the game has remained the same, and that only the players have changed.
"Both when it comes to the SPI, and when it comes to the fight against corruption, party financing and the whole set of laws that should limit or control the government, they are not ready to change now, in order to be subject to those controls," said Milovac.
Muk assessed that there is no law on the Government and the Assembly for the same reasons as everything else, but that there is also a personal moment, because that law was extended by former minister Raško Konjević.
"That is not an excuse, because that law is still included in the program for this year and the Government is already late because it promised to determine the draft law in the first quarter," stated Muk.
She said that it is important to standardize the transparency of Government sessions, the technical mandate, the number of ministries, and that it is less important whether this will be done by the rules of procedure of the Assembly, the law on state administration or the Government.
According to her, the most "stuck" in the Law on Government is the structure and organization of the Government.
"It is not a standard to prescribe the number of ministries, their names and the like, but I am in favor of preventing the excuses of the constant reorganization of our governments, for their inaction," Muk said.
Milovac said that the example of the governments of Krivokapić and Abazović showed why the law on the government was important.
"Abazović promoted his government as a government of inclusiveness, which came down to the fact that everyone he needed for political support received a certain portfolio. We have two ministers without portfolios, the lack of a framework was used to return political appointments," Milovac said.
As he stated, after losing the majority in the parliament, Abazović formed the National Council for the Fight against Corruption, laws are passed, concessions are given that will outlive several subsequent governments.
"The government is working at full capacity because there are no restrictions on the level of authority and the type of decisions it can make while it is in a technical mandate, and this implies maintaining the system until the next election," Milovac said.
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