{"id":21007,"date":"2018-06-20T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-06-19T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/parliament-could-but-doesn-t-want-to-control-the-police\/"},"modified":"2020-07-21T20:33:26","modified_gmt":"2020-07-21T18:33:26","slug":"parliament-could-but-doesn-t-want-to-control-the-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/parliament-could-but-doesn-t-want-to-control-the-police\/","title":{"rendered":"Parliament Could but Doesn\u2019t Want to Control the Police"},"content":{"rendered":"\tThere is no parliamentary control of the police due to the lack of a democratic culture and the fact that the Parliament became an administrative body implementing the Government\u2019s decisions, it was assessed at the roundtable organized by\u00a0<\/span>Belgrade Centre for Security Policy (BCSP)<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>on June 20, 2018 in Belgrade.<\/p>\n\tParliamentary control of the police is weak, although a large number of opposition parties entered the Parliament two years ago and the legal framework has been improved by adopting a new Law on Police, which gave MPs eight ways for police control and oversight, assessed\u00a0<\/span>BCSP researcher\u00a0<\/span>Sa\u0161a Djordjevi\u0107<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n\t\t\u201cMPs are enabled to oversee the conduct of special investigative techniques, such as wiretapping. However, in practice more than 40 laws in the area of security were adopted without proper debate, putting a large number of draft laws into one agenda item. The work of the Defence and Internal Affairs Committee is focused on the automatic adoption of quarterly reports by the Ministry of Interior. For three years in a row, reports of independent control institutions have not been considered,\u201d Djordjevi\u0107 said.<\/em><\/p>\n\tBCSP researcher\u00a0<\/span>Vladimir Erceg<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0<\/span>stressed that the situation can be improved if the competencies of the Defence and Internal Affairs Committee are specified by the rules of procedure, consideration of reports by independent control institutions begins, the practice of asking parliamentary questions is improved and the reporting of the Ministry of Interior to Parliament is enhanced.<\/p>\n\t\t\u201cBoard members should ask MoI to analyze trends of the most important police results in the fight against corruption or traffic safety, showing how the situation changed over the past five to ten years, not only in relation to the same quarter of the previous year. It is also important to analyze how the recommendations of the Internal Audit Department are carried out, which takes care that the MoI is doing well financially,\u201d explained Erceg.<\/em><\/p>\n\tThe situation is not different when looking at the role of the entire Parliament in controlling the executive authority, not the only police. Everything related to oversight and executive authority control is falling, and the primary reason is lack of democratic culture, underlined\u00a0<\/span>Pavle Dimitrijevi\u0107 from CRTA (Centre for Research, Transparency and Accountability)<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\t\t\u201cWe cannot say that the Parliament performs a supervisory role. In this convention, 293 laws were passed, while 15 out of 21 completely new draft laws were adopted in an accelerated procedure. These are areas that have not been regulated so far and laws have been adopted with as little discussion as possible. At the moment, the opposition representative presides over only one committee, while there were only 25 public hearings, and now only seven. Without maturing of the political culture, we will not be able to go ahead,\u201d said Dimitrijevi\u0107.<\/em><\/p>\n\tThe discussion included journalists, representatives of the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection, Members of Parliament and civil society.<\/p>\n\tRadoje Gvozdenovi\u0107 from the Commissioner\u2019s Office<\/strong>\u00a0<\/span>confirmed that in the plenary session of the Parliament, the last Commissioner\u2019s report considered was from 2013, although it is a legal obligation, and the topic often was the work of the police.<\/p>\n\t\t\u201cIt can be concluded that implementation of the controlling role of the Parliament towards the executive authority and the implementation of the Commissioner\u2019s recommendations is lacking. Society loses on it. In that report, there really are facts which the Parliament should know and make conclusions about, especially considering that complaints to the Commissioner due to the failure of the Ministry of Interior make up 25.6 percent of all complaints filed,\u201d Gvozdenovi\u0107 said.<\/em><\/p>\n\tMP Radoslav Miloji\u010di\u0107<\/strong>\u00a0<\/span>agreed that there is no parliamentary control of the executive authority. He recommended that the situation could be rectified at the technical level if the order of the parliamentary questions changes, and if the chairperson of Parliament committees come from the opposition parties, as it was before.<\/p>\n\t\t\u201cParliamentary questions should first be set by the largest opposition party, and then from the ruling coalition, as it was until 2012. We have also sent a proposal to appoint the chairperson of the Defence and Internal Affairs Committee from the opposition so that we can implement any initiatives in practice,\u201d Miloji\u010di\u0107 recommended.<\/em><\/p>\n\tBelgrade Centre for Security Policy<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>organized a roundtable aimed at sharpening recommendations that should strengthen parliamentary control and oversight of the police, which will be an integral part of the Roadmap for strengthening the integrity of the police in the Western Balkans, intended for the international community, and above all the European Union, Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.<\/p>\n

\tBe free to contact us at office@bezbednost.org if you would like to contribute to the development of improved recommendations.\tThe roundtable was organized as part of the project \u201cWestern Balkans Pulse for Police Integrity and Trust<\/a>\u201c, with the support of the European Union (EU) through the program \u201cCivil Society Facility.\u201d Stated opinions don\u2019t necessarily reflect opinions of the EU.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is no parliamentary control of the police due to the lack of a democratic culture and the fact that the Parliament became an administrative body implementing the Government\u2019s decisions, it was assessed at the roundtable organized by\u00a0Belgrade Centre for Security Policy (BCSP)\u00a0on June 20, 2018 in Belgrade. Parliamentary control …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":14466,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8596,8598,8591],"tags":[264,5181,7287,10449,4314,8148,10448,7079,7720,7083,9926,8489,7940,7482,4991,8029],"vest_saopstenje":[9454],"coauthors":[164,8671],"class_list":["post-21007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oversight","category-police","category-serbian-security-policy","tag-264","tag-ldquo","tag-rdquo","tag-authority","tag-committee","tag-control","tag-doesn-t","tag-executive","tag-improved","tag-internal","tag-opposition","tag-parliament","tag-parliamentary","tag-police","tag-security","tag-situation","vest_saopstenje-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21007\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21007"},{"taxonomy":"vest_saopstenje","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/vest_saopstenje?post=21007"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=21007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}