The Center for Civil Liberties (CEGAS) announced that a number of controlled secret surveillance measures were declared secret. They were told this by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, to which they had asked the request for free access to that data.
"CEGAS (Civil Liberties Center) is monitoring the use and control of secret surveillance measures, which temporarily limit the rights of citizens, guaranteed by the Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights, and which (measures) should be aimed at combating serious crimes, began to doubt the valid use of this institute, if we take into account the large number of those carried out, the disproportionately small number of those resulting in convictions and the lack of control.
When, as they said, there is no adequate control, "and also when our access to figures is restricted, certainly there is no doubt about the properly implemented mechanisms of secret surveillance measures".
"In addition to the judicial and prosecutorial control of secret surveillance measures in the form of approving them and monitoring the continuous implementation procedure, as well as parliamentary supervision, CEGAS addressed the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Department for Internal Control of Police Work, through the Request for Free Access to Information, asking for the number of controlled measures of secret surveillance in the period for 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, where we received a negative Decision, because as stated by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 'the requested data refers to documentation marked with the level of secrecy,'" the statement added.
CEGAS believes that the information on the number of controlled measures of secret surveillance cannot and must not be secret information, which "certainly cannot endanger anyone's right", as well as the procedure itself, but "only one can find out whether and to what extent this Department deals with affairs within its jurisdiction, in the part of controlling the implementation of secret surveillance measures".
"In addition to the number of controlled secret surveillance measures, from all the institutions that have the right to do so, CEGAS believes that it would be good to have a number of the destroyed material obtained through secret surveillance measures, as well as the number of those that were attended without legal restrictions by the persons who were the subject of the measures of secret surveillance," added that NGO.
It would be good to know, as they said, the number of persons who have been notified of a secret surveillance measure, in the event that criminal proceedings are not initiated, "and there are a large number of them", in accordance with Article 162 of the Law on Criminal procedure of Montenegro.
"In order to protect the rights of citizens, in the future Report on the work of the State Prosecutor's Office and the Prosecutor's Council, it would be good if, in the part of the notification about the conducted MTN, there is also a section with the number of those persons who were notified about the conducted MTN, because they themselves were the subject of measures, and no criminal proceedings were conducted against them, in accordance with the CPC", it concludes.
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