Union of Municipalities: The state was damaged for millions of euros by abuse of the right to free access to information

Due to numerous abuses of the Law on Free Access to Information in the previous period, the state, including local governments, was damaged for millions of euros through the costs of administrative procedures and disputes, so further damage must be prevented by appropriate changes to that law, according to the statement of the Union of Municipalities of Montenegro. referred to the Parliamentary Committee for Political System, Judiciary and Administration, which will have a discussion today regarding the proposed amendments to that legal solution.

The Community of Municipalities, as they said, "without hesitation supports" the public's right to know, that is, the indisputable public interest in free access to information as one of the achievements of European legislation in the function of the fight against corruption, but, as stated in the statement sent by the general secretary of the ZOCG Mišela Manojlović, the existing legal solution "unfortunately made it possible for some NGOs, which present themselves as the only fighters for the protection and rational use of public funds, to actually ravage state and local budgets by abusing this right."

"So in practice it happens that, for example, some NGOs send hundreds of requests to some authority at once, or they often ask for information that is decades old and cannot be found, or it happens that companies are asked for information in the domain of trade secrets , the disclosure of which would cause irreparable damage. Since in these and other ways the state authorities are prevented from responding within the legal deadline, lawsuits and procedures follow in which around 4.000 euros are taken from the state per request for the costs of the dispute," the statement reads.

"I have information from the Administrative Court that in the middle of 2023 a decision was made on the costs of the proceedings in the amount of over 10 million euros, a large part of which is based on the basis of free access to information, and that only one lawyer filed a huge number of standard lawsuits in one day the management's silence, neatly packed in large packages, and additionally asked to participate in a completely unnecessary oral hearing, on the basis of which he will certainly be awarded around 70.000 euros. Whether this is an alarm, I leave it to everyone to conclude," stated Manojlović.

ZOCG, "taking into account all harmful practices", suggests in its statement on the Draft Law on Amendments to the Law on Free Access to Information, submitted by the Government, that, among other things, the public interest should be clearly defined in favor of the authorities and that in case of disclosure of data that causes material or non-material damage, the applicant must be obliged to compensate that damage.

"It is also proposed that the law limit requests for free access only to those information that are within the retention periods stipulated in the List of categories of registration material with retention periods that will be published on the website of the authorities. The proposal is also that the deadline for deciding on free access to information complies with the Law on Administrative Procedure, i.e. that it amounts to 30 days. As a mechanism to prevent the constant repetition of requests that have already been answered negatively due to lack of information, it is proposed that such requests be sanctioned as misdemeanors with a larger fine," the statement added.

ZOCG, as they said, also warned that in the existing proposal for amendments to the Law on Free Access to Information, the two-stage procedure is suspended in certain cases, that the provisions on limiting free access do not include minors as a specially protected category of residents, and that it is not prescribed the deadline in which the applicant must submit proof that he has paid the costs of the procedure.

"Special statements on the proposed amendments to this law were submitted by the municipalities of Bar and Plužine. Oština Bar suggests that the deadline for re-accessing the same information should not be shortened from six months to 90 days, as well as that it is necessary to extend the deadline for delivering the decision, while The municipality of Plužine proposes, among other things, to limit the number of requests that one applicant can submit in a certain period," the announcement concludes.