Imagine the following situation: Government of Serbia needs to adopt decisions related to an infrastructure project that should be built near your place. As someone who is interested in the details of what will be built, who will build it and when, how much it will all cost and when it will be completed, you may ideally fall into the following scenario.
On the official website, open the live broadcast of the session of the Government of Serbia that interests you. When you've watched the entire broadcast, since you still don't understand everything about the construction, you decide to ask the authorities what it's all about. On the same day, you will receive a friendly reply to your email, with all the information you were interested in.
Then, when the proposal of the Government is adopted Assembly of Serbia, you can find answers to all questions related to the financing of that project in the regular quarterly financial reports, as well as in the reports on the work of the Government, ministries and local governments.
As an interested citizen, in this way you have complete insight into what is being built, why it is being built, where and how much citizens' money has been spent on it so far, all in dinars and in real time.
Then again, you may experience the following reality: you hear in the media that the government intends to build a project near you. Unfortunately, that very session of the Government is missing from its website, so you cannot see any documents. You write an email to the authorities with detailed questions, however, you never get any response.
You resort to another method - you send the Government a request for access to information of public importance. Again you never get an answer. The only thing you can do now is to appeal to the Administrative Court, so when it comes down to it and in a few years, you might find out something about who is building there, for what money, and the like. Of course, if the government itself does not boast about the project and thus reveal certain details.
Of course, the reader has long recognized that the first option - in which the executive power, ministries and administrative bodies are absolutely open, transparent and accountable to citizens - is not the picture from Serbia, that is, if you have the misfortune of needing something from the government, all of them is the chance that you will experience the latter variant. Otherwise, if you are lucky enough to receive an answer from the administrative body, it is very easy for you to receive a "photographed" Excel table or similar gem from the requested documents.
WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS
Exactly this - the level of openness and transparency of executive authorities - was investigated by the organization "Partners Serbia" at a total of 60 institutions in Serbia and the data was published in the publication entitled "Openness of executive authorities in Serbia and the region".
What did they come up with in this research? With similar results as last year: that "there is no essential progress of these institutions when it comes to openness and transparency", and that the general assessment is still that "the trend of non-transparent and closed business continues to be applied with equal or stronger intensity".
What else did this organization discover and based on which parameters?
"Conducting the same research several years in a row, we can conclude that political will is a key factor that affects the level of openness of institutions in the Republic of Serbia. (...) The lack of political will to adopt and implement policies of openness and transparency blocks real reforms in this field, and the absence of effective supervision over compliance with obligations in relation to free access to information means that we have institutions that behave as if they are above the law," they state. Partners Serbia".
How did they measure this?
They took four indicators of the openness of Serbia's executive authorities - the Government of Serbia, the provincial government, ministries and administrative bodies - and then compared them both with neighboring countries (North Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina) and in relation to themselves in the previous period.
Those four indicators are transparency, accessibility, integrity and efficiency, and at almost every level except the level of the ministries, Serbia is at the bottom of the table: the Government of the Republic of Serbia is in third place out of the four observed countries, as well as the administrative bodies that fulfill only slightly more than third of the observed indicators.
When it comes to transparency, neither the provincial nor the republican government has published annual, semi-annual, or quarterly work reports, and neither government "regularly" publishes minutes and transcripts from the sessions; citizens can only dream about those live broadcasts of government sessions.
On the face of it, even the legal solution of one of the main mechanisms for ensuring transparency in the executive branch - the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance - does not benefit the citizens.
As is known, this law was changed in 2021, and that change did not solve the basic problem: when a government body does not want to provide some information created in its work, it simply will not provide it, no matter how much the person requesting that information has the right to demand it: even 20 years after the introduction of the aforementioned law into the legal system of the State of Serbia, no realistic mechanism was provided that would compel the authority to provide the requested information.
That is why it is not surprising that even 25 percent of the institutions contacted by "Partneri Serbia" did not respond to the request for free access to information of public importance - and the Government of the Republic of Serbia is the first among them. Or, as stated in "Partners of Serbia", "when one of the highest institutions in Serbia violates the law, it sends a signal to other institutions that such behavior is acceptable, and perhaps even desirable."
Of course, it is not until this law, far from it. Only 27 percent of the institutions answered the "optional" questions, which did not go through an official request but through an ordinary questionnaire. Or, in translation, when it is "not mandatory" to answer, the institutions will not answer, and why should they when they don't answer when they have to.
SPECIAL JOBS
However, perhaps the best image of the government's attitude towards transparency is represented by the new so-called the law on the Expo exhibition, which is planned for 2027.
Namely, the state previously suffered criticism from the EU for a long time due to the so-called of the law on line infrastructure, which "extracted" the most expensive infrastructure works from the public procurement system. That law was finally repealed in mid-2023. However, just a few months later, the government submitted to the Parliament a proposal for a new "special" law - the Law on Special Procedures for the Realization of the International Specialized Exhibition EXPO BELGRADE 2027. This law again "extracts" jobs from the public procurement system, namely jobs valued at approx. 17-18 billion euros.
It should also be remembered how "transparently" the current state budget was adopted: according to the bad old custom, instead of adopting the budget being the only item on the agenda, the executive and legislative authorities, along with the budget, "pushed" about 60 more items on the agenda. Epilogue - each parliamentary group had a little less than 19 seconds available for each item on the agenda, "Partneri Srbija" reminds.
When it comes to accessibility, a sufficient indicator of this indicator at all observed levels is the fact that "Partners Serbia" did not find any files in machine-readable formats, such as XML, CSV, JSON and others. The farthest the executive power "throws" is data in Excel tables and, as stated by "Partners", "institutions often publish documents in the format of scanned documents" which "prevents their further processing, analysis and search, which significantly reduces the transparency and availability of information." ".
They also refer to the long-established Open Data Portal and the fact that around 2700 data sets are currently available on it. When you compare the total number of public authorities and organizations with entrusted public powers in Serbia - of which there are more than 12.000 - you get a nice illustration of how much this portal is actually used and how open the data is.
Things are not the best with regard to integrity either, considering that there is no code of ethics, no integrity plan, or any document regulating the handling of corruption cases on the website of the Government of Serbia, nor on the website of the provincial government. At the same time, none of the websites of these governments contain information on the protection of whistleblowers, which, as "Partners Serbia" states, "plays a vital role in detecting and preventing corruption within institutions."
Finally, the institutions were evaluated on the effectiveness of the services provided, that is, the readiness of the institutions to learn from current processes and improve them through the established systems for monitoring, evaluation and learning. This, as stated by "Partner of Serbia", is "key for identifying potential problems, improving user experience and adapting services to the needs of citizens and the economy".
Within this area, it was observed whether institutions prepare and submit financial reports to other competent institutions, as well as whether they use performance indicators when preparing plans and reports. With 37,50 percent for governments, 32,40 percent for ministries and 15,97 percent for administrative bodies, Serbia ranks last in relation to the countries of the region for these indicators as well, according to the findings of "Partner of Serbia".
It is needless to say how much all this makes life miserable for citizens, and especially for journalists.
Indicators
"Transparency is reflected in the availability of various information, such as the presentation of the structure and organization of work of public authorities, contact information of officials, biographies of prominent officials, work program, work reports, strategies, plans, data on public procurement, etc.
Accessibility is reflected through the practice of the institution when it comes to exercising the right to access information of public importance, the ability of citizens to participate in public discussions and public consultations, the availability of e-services on the institution's websites, the availability of e-channels of communication for asking questions, making objections to work of institutions and the like.
Integrity is evaluated using indicators related to the existence of procedures and the availability of documents that regulate integrity standards, information on the protection of whistleblowers, the publication of integrity plans and other anti-corruption documents, the training of officials to deal with cases of corruption and conflicts of interest, everything that we can do together we define as mechanisms for the prevention of corruption.
"Effectiveness refers to the existence of procedures for monitoring and evaluating one's own work, and the activities that institutions should carry out in order to plan, implement and evaluate strategic and daily activities and financial operations", according to "Partners of Serbia".
