And retired police officers on the checklist

Active police officers will also have to submit a report on the change of property ownership in the previous five years, and those who retired between 2012 and today will also have to submit their property status to the Anti-corruption Department for inspection, the Minister of Internal Affairs told "Vijesta" Danilo Šaranović.

Violations of official duties, he emphasizes, which are related to ignoring these obligations, can lead to dismissal, while former officials, who are willing to hide assets and therefore pay high fines, can also be the subject of an investigation.

Those, Šaranović points out, are some of the main novelties of the Law on Internal Affairs, about which the deputies in the Parliament of Montenegro will declare themselves again today.

President Jakov Milatovic on August 20, he returned to parliament the Law on Amendments to the Law on Internal Affairs, stating that this regulation introduces a special procedure for hiring police officers without public advertising and without a personnel plan.

"According to the adopted legal solution, the complete procedure for the selection of police officers is carried out by the Ministry of Internal Affairs through a commission formed by the minister, which is given the de facto discretionary right to make decisions on the employment of a large number of police officers, and considering that ministers are undoubtedly politically elected persons , in this sense, there is a high degree of risk of additional politicization of both the aforementioned Ministry and the police," says Milatović's explanation.

Similar arguments were presented by a DPS representative during the August debate in the parliament Danijel Zivkovic, who then claimed that "in this process, the minister will be a key figure, because employment in the Police Directorate cannot be done without his consent, which creates preconditions for great abuses and the exercise of direct political influence in the employment of police officers, and as we witnessed the struggle for supremacy and party influence in the security sector, then it is clear what these changes in the law lead to".

Šaranović, however, says that one of the main recommendations of the Group of Countries for the Fight against Corruption (GRECO), which stipulates that police officers must be controlled beyond "data from criminal records and security checks, and that controls should be carried out in at regular intervals, because personal circumstances can change over time and make employees more vulnerable to possible risks of corruption".

"It is quite clear to me why it bothers DPS. Their reasons for nervousness make me happy and confirm that we are on the right track. We will know why the president of the state is in the same pain as the DPS, we will know soon", said Šaranović.

Under scrutiny and "cleaning up the tracks"

The new regulation, explains the Minister of the Interior, envisages the introduction of an obligation for police officers to submit a report on changes in property ownership in the last five years.

"We considered this norm to be very important, because the introduction of the obligation to submit property records was 'announced' through the adoption of the law in June 2021, and we have come to the mechanisms for checking the lifestyle only now - after a full three years. In this way, all those who possibly had property disproportionate to their income were 'timely warned' to get rid of that property by transferring it to third parties or by selling it and thus 'clear' their tracks. They had three full years to do it. By applying this norm, when the law is re-voted in the Assembly, such activities, if there were any, will come to light," Saranović said.

He emphasizes that the current law prescribes the obligation that all former police officers who have stopped working since 2012 until today have the obligation to submit property reports for the period after they stopped working in the police.

"However, the law did not prescribe a sanction that would force them to actually do it, because the sanctions for active police officers were inapplicable to former police officers. You can't fire an ex-cop. Amendments to the law for former police officers who do not submit a report or submit incorrect information prescribe fairly high fines, as a first step. "If it turns out that someone is willing to knowingly break the law and pay large sums in order not to submit their assets for inspection, this may indicate the need for further activities under the jurisdiction of the police," Saranović warned.

Shorter proceedings against those who ignore obligations

Saranović specifies that by July 31, 2024, 3.301 police officers submitted their property report, while 105 did so after the deadline.

According to him, the latest data from the Anti-corruption Department show that 6,4 percent of police officers have not yet fulfilled this legal obligation.

According to Šaranović, the amendments to the Law will give wider powers to the Anti-corruption Department.

He specifies that the current law was quite "incomplete" in the part that concerned property records and checking the lifestyle of police officers, "so the only possible sanctioning procedure was insufficiently efficient".

"The current Law on Internal Affairs, which was adopted in June 2021, formally introduced the obligation to submit property records, but did not prescribe adequate sanctions for those who do not do so, nor an effective sanctioning procedure. With these amendments to the law, failure to submit a report or failure to submit accurate data in the report is directly defined as a serious breach of official duty, so the Anti-Corruption Department will no longer have to go through the Ethics Committee to the Disciplinary Committee. Also, failure to act on a verbal or written order of the Anti-corruption Department will be considered a more serious breach of official duty," Saranović said.

Sanctions for a serious breach of official duty, he explains, can range from fines to termination of employment.

"...Whereas it is a legal obligation that serious violations of official duties with elements of corruption are sanctioned by dismissal", stressed Šaranović.

Respect for GREKO recommendations

Answering a question regarding the introduction of special recruitment procedures, which will be carried out in the MUP, and not in the Human Resources Administration, Šaranović reminds that the Law on Civil Servants and State Employees defines the procedure for filling positions in bodies that perform affairs of the police, security, security of detained and convicted persons..., can be regulated by a special law.

"Therefore, the exclusion of the police recruitment procedure from the Human Resources Administration was planned much earlier. It is quite logical that the specific checks and needs of personnel selection for the police cannot be implemented in full capacity in the Directorate for Human Resources", he claims.

He reiterates that the goal of the MUP is to introduce an additional integrity check for the first time during the recruitment process, and after checking the criminal records and security issues, and in this way to fulfill the GREKO recommendations.

"A special step forward will be the method and structure of the procedure for checking knowledge and skills, which will be created based on the best international practices," claims Šaranović.

He points out that all this was not possible in the usual procedure of the Human Resources Administration.

"From all of the above, you can conclude that the candidates will have to pass through the filters of several commissions, while in the Directorate for Human Resources, the complete knowledge verification procedure would be carried out by one, three-member body, which consists of one representative of the Directorate, one representative of the MUP and one expert in that areas. If we add to that the fact that a public call will announce the need to fill several hundreds of positions in the police, this could mean at least twice or three times as many candidates applied, according to current experiences, so the procedure in the Administration, according to the current dynamics, would last an infinite amount of time ", Saranović explains.

He pointed out that the Ministry of Interior, explaining these changes in the regulations, emphasized that "we do not have a public advertisement, but we do have a public invitation".

"We emphasized that there is no staffing plan, because if there was, we would not have found the police lacking 1.500 police officers," Saranović concluded.