HRA: Committee supports amendments to the Law on Internal Affairs, despite announcements that it will await the EC's opinion

Human Rights Action (HRA) expressed its protest because the Committee on Political System, Judiciary and Administration today, as the lead committee of the Parliament, supported the Bill on Amendments to the Law on Internal Affairs and sent it to the plenum.

The NGO points out that this was done despite earlier announcements that it would wait for alignment with the positions of official Brussels.

"The Committee session on Friday was not announced on the official website of the Parliament, thus deliberately excluding the interested public from participating in the discussion at the session. This practice cannot be considered a procedural error, but represents a direct violation of the principle of transparency in the work of the Parliament," the statement reads.

They recall that Interior Minister Danilo Šaranović previously said that they expected the European Commission's approval before sending the law to the Parliament for a vote. Despite that public promise, as HRA says, the law was still forwarded for further parliamentary procedure without waiting for the European Commission's opinion.

"It was also announced at the 44th meeting of the Security and Defense Committee that the Europe Now Movement's position is that a prior opinion from the European Commission is necessary for consideration of this law. This was overturned and three PES MPs still voted in favor of adopting the Proposal in the parent committee," they add.

They point out that the bill that was "pushed through to the plenum in this way" does not contain the changes that some government officials spoke about in public.

"There is no classification of security violations into more serious and less serious, nor have mechanisms been introduced to protect against abuse. Instead, provisions have been adopted that allow unconfirmed operational information or even simple rumors to lead to the termination of a police officer's employment by force of law, without the right to insight into the reasons, without the right to defense and without the right to an effective legal remedy."

Additionally, according to HRA, the European Commission informed the NGO in a letter the day before the start of the Christmas holidays that a revised version of the amendments to the Law on Internal Affairs had been submitted to them and that it was "currently subject to assessment by the competent services of the Commission in order to verify compliance with the EU acquis and European standards", and that "it must be ensured that police recruitment procedures are based on merit, as well as that there are appropriate procedural guarantees to prevent undue political influence in law enforcement bodies."

"The adoption of a law that so deeply infringes on human rights, on Sunday, without a public announcement of the session, without public participation and without the opinion of the European Commission, represents a deliberate undermining of democratic procedures and seriously questions the sincerity of the authorities' declarative commitment to European standards and European integration. This is not a reform of the security system, but the institutionalization of legal uncertainty and political arbitrariness," the statement reads.