the executive director of Action for Human Rights, Tea Gorjanc-Prelević, submitted a response to "Dnevne novine" regarding the text that the newspaper published today on title i the next two pages, portraying Gorjanc-Prelević's private correspondence with the European Commission official, Sonja Diez, as an "international scandal".
The contested correspondence between Gorjanc-Prelević and Diez is published on the HRA website in the original and the translation.
Here is Gorjanc-Prelevic's answer:
"Unauthorized publication of my correspondence with Ms. Sonja Diez from the European Commission, apart from being problematic from a moral aspect and journalistic ethics, is also a criminal offense Violation of confidentiality of letters and other shipments from Article 172 of the Criminal Code of Montenegro.
"Dnevne novine" published the private correspondence incompletely and with falsification of the part that refers to Mrs. Sonja Diez. The part of her answer to me at the beginning of the text "I expect Luka to be on our side", which she did not write, was falsified. Mrs. Diez from the European Commission (EC) did not express any position in our correspondence except that she hopes that the by-laws based on the Law on the Judicial Council will be of high quality. In addition, Mrs. Diez informed me about the position of the Judicial Council on the application of the law in the case of the election of the president of the Administrative Court and asked for my comment. HRA received the same vague position directly from the Judicial Council.
All the positions that I, as a human rights activist, communicated in my personal correspondence to Mrs. Sonja Diez from the EC were previously published in the announcements and public statements of the Human Rights Action (HRA), so they are neither news nor a scandal, as presented by "Dnevne novine" ” in a transparent attempt to discredit both the HRA and the EC.
HRA's criticism of the work of the Judicial Council is well known. Our views on the Council's dubious decision-making on the selection of judges, which in the case of the election of the president of the Administrative Court seems to be completely illegal, were communicated to the president of the Judicial Council and were repeated recently at the presentation of the report on the progress of Montenegro. In the meantime, we have supplemented the views from the correspondence published by "Dnevne Novine" with new criticisms of the Judicial Council, and have already communicated this in detail to the public. We will once again draw the attention of MPs to the worryingly non-objective work of the Judicial Council, as they should soon discuss the report on the work of the Judicial Council for 2014.
HRA's position on the election of Mrs. Branka Lakočević as president of the Administrative Court is also known. Although she has never been a judge, Ms. Lakočević, quite unconvincingly, was rated better by the Council than the two judges of the Administrative Court, even though the candidate's previous work as a judge had to be evaluated for the election of the president. In order to avoid misunderstandings, it is not about the expertise and undoubted experience of Ms. Lakočević, who could accordingly have been elected to some other position (minister of justice or president of the Constitutional Court), but rather about non-compliance with the rules in the work of the Judicial Council.
In response to the question of "Dnevnih Novina" about what Mrs. Šofranac maliciously declares to be the "best part" of the correspondence, when I write that I hope that Luka Perili (EC expert for secondary legislation) will be on "our side", I explain that by that I considered the position of Perili, with which the HRA has already publicly disagreed, that the laws in Montenegro in relation to the election of judges and prosecutors should not be very detailed, but that they should give some room for discretion to those who decide on those elections. I believe that every government - as an "official party" always welcomes additional room for maneuver, in contrast to our - activist "party" - which has long insisted on narrowing such space by adopting precise indicators for the evaluation of candidates and for the first choice for the position of judge and especially for their promotion. I would have explained that if "Dnevne novine" had not rushed to publish my private correspondence in which no one is obliged to explain themselves in detail.
Therefore, I still hope that our "side" will win, and that Mr. Perili will advocate that the indicators for evaluating the criteria for the selection of judges and prosecutors be as detailed and precise as possible. I don't really have any other militancy here, except for the public interest in the form of protecting impartial progress in the judiciary.
HRA, like many other NGOs in Montenegro and the region, has been openly communicating and cooperating with EC employees, foreign diplomats and representatives of international organizations such as the UN, the Council of Europe and the OSCE for years on the subject of judicial reform and the acceptance of international human rights standards. The fact that the NGO's conversation with organizations of which Montenegro is a member or whose membership is aspiring to "Dnevni novine" is suspicious and scandalous, only shows that they are obviously left behind in some outdated spy movie."
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