Opinions and Statements

The Protector of Citizens, Zoran Pašalić, said today that this institution will pay special attention to the regular elections for members of national councils of national minorities, which will be held on Sunday, 13 November 2022, at 949 polling stations in the Republic of Serbia. At the same time, he called on members of national minorities to contact him if their rights get violated.

Pašalić reminds that members of national councils are elected by 23 national minorities, of which 19 have fulfilled the conditions for direct elections, and four national minorities will elect their members through the electoral assembly.

National councils, as minority self-government bodies, exercise their powers in the area of culture, education, information and official use of language and script, and the Protector of Citizens calls on members of national minorities to use their right to vote and go to the polls in as large a number as possible.

According to the concluded special voter sheets, it was determined that 19 national minorities fulfilled the condition for direct elections (Albanian, Ashkali, Bosniak, Bulgarian, Bunjevac, Wallachian, Greek, Egyptian, Hungarian, German, Polish, Roma, Russian, Romanian, Ruthenian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Czech), and four of them for elections through the electoral assembly (Gorani, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Croatian), with the fact that the Executive Board of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Serbia, by law, performs the function of the national council and does not participate in the election process.

The Protector of Citizens, Zoran Pašalić, said today that the new law on local ombudsmen should stipulate that every municipality and city in Serbia must have a local protector of human rights, but also explicitly define the protection of people who perform this function after their mandate expires.

"The essence of this law should be that every local self-government must have an ombudsman and that this should no longer depend on the decision or desire of the local self-government unit. The position of the local ombudsman must be regulated in detail – the duration of the mandate, the manner of work, who provides the premises for his work, but also how he will be protected when his mandate ends", said Pašalić after the meeting of the Board of Directors of the Association of Local Ombudsmen of Serbia, which was held in Niš.

Pašalić explained that if the local ombudsman does his job well, it can have far-reaching consequences for himself and his family, which is why the institution of the Republic Protector of Citizens insists that the protection of the local ombudsman after the end of his mandate be explicitly defined by law.

Pašalić added that the Institution of the Protector of Citizens receives the most complaints from citizens of Serbia in connection with the work of the local administration, the Republic Geodetic Authority and the cadastre.

After the launching of the control investigation by the Protector of Citizens, the Secretariat for Education and Child Care of the City Administration of the City of Belgrade enabled a child to use the service of a personal companion, who had the right to do so in the opinion of the Commission for assessing the need for providing additional educational, health and social support.

Following the complaint of the mother of the child who was not allowed to use this service and who was put on the waiting list, the Protector of Citizens launched an investigation to control the regularity and legality of work of the competent city secretariat.

As part of the investigation, the Protector of Citizens established that in October 2021, the child's mother submitted a request to the City Centre for Social Work in Belgrade – New Belgrade Department for the provision of the service of personal companion for the child, and that a month later, the Humanitarian Organization "Child’s Heart" from of Belgrade, as a licensed and authorized provider of this service, informed this authority that the current capacities are full and that the child is enrolled on the waiting list.

The Protector of Citizens also established that at the end of June 2022, the City Centre sent an urgent request to the organization "Child’s Heart" for the provision of the service of a personal companion for the child, as a priority, after which the waiting list was updated and the position of the complainant’s child was changed because another child stopped using this service as of 1 August 2022.

The Protector of Citizens was informed that the procedure for the inclusion of the complainant's child in the child's personal companion service is in progress, thereby meeting the legal conditions for the suspension of the investigation against the competent city secretariat.

The Deputy Protector of Citizens for Gender Equality, Jelena Stojanović, stated this evening that the elderly persons in the Republic of Serbia belong to the most vulnerable category of the population and called on them to actively participate in exercising all the rights that belong to them.

"Elderly persons, especially elderly women in the countryside, have difficulties in accessing the health, social and other services in the community. They are often exposed to abuse and violence in the economic, social and physical sense, and for this reason I invite them to actively participate in the exercise and protection of their rights when they feel that they have been violated", said Stojanović at the opening of the photo exhibition "The Beauty of Aging 2".

At the opening of the exhibition organized by the association "Amity – Strength of Friendship" on the occasion of the International Day of Older Persons, Stojanović called on all elderly persons to contact the Protector of Citizens if they are exposed to any kind of abuse or if they cannot fulfil their rights before the competent authorities.

The Deputy Protector of Citizens added that the most common problems faced by the elderly are poverty and violence, as well as neglect within the family, including disposal of property without their consent and difficulties in exercising the right to help and care of another person.

The Protector of Citizens sent an Opinion to the Municipal Administration of the Municipality of Kula, the Provincial Secretariat for Urban Planning and Environmental Protection and the Provincial Secretariat for Agriculture, Water Management and Forestry, in which he indicated that it is necessary for the competent inspection authorities to strengthen mutual cooperation and coordination and take all measures that will lead to the final cessation of the discharge of untreated wastewater into the canal network of the Great Bačka Canal, with the sanctioning of all polluters.

Bearing in mind that no responsibility has been established for the large fish kill that occurred in October 2019 in the Great Bačka Canal, as well as that disturbances in the water regime in that canal were determined in 2020 and 2021, the Protector of Citizens considers that, although the realization of the project of remediation/revitalization of the Great Bačka Canal is underway, there is still a risk of the emergence of new consequences of the pollution of that watercourse, if the discharge of untreated wastewater continues.

The Deputy Protector of Citizens, Jelena Stojanović, stated today that the social rights of children include the right to various types of social support, but that it is necessary to further improve the protection of families and children in the area of social policy.

"Restriction of employment in centres for social work, non-establishment of all centres for family placement and adoption, absence of social-health care institutions and uneven financing of personal companion services, had negative consequences on the provision of services to families and children, and the Protector of Citizens will continue to insist on eliminating these shortcomings", Stojanović said at the forum "Let children's week last the whole year" in Ćuprija.

After the recommendation of the Protector of Citizens at the beginning of 2021, the Ministry of Labour, Employment, Veteran and Social Affairs secured the consent of the Government of the Republic of Serbia for the employment of 187 new professional workers, Stojanović reminded at the forum organized by the Association "Knights of Smiles" and the Association of Lawyers in Social Protection "Argument".

She also stated that in 2021, again on the basis of the opinion of the Protector of Citizens and after the decision of the Constitutional Court, amendments were made to the Law on Financial Support for Families, from which the provision was deleted that expressly prevented the simultaneous use of the right to compensation of wages during leave for the special care of a child and the right to an allowance for the assistance and care of another person.

Stojanović presented the work of the Summer School of the Protector of Citizens, which was held in Novi Sad in mid-September, where children from all over Serbia, including those from foster families, learned about the rights of children and persons with disabilities, the rights of the elderly, protection from all forms of violence and abuse, recognition and protection from human trafficking, as well as strengthening the participation of children in processes concerning their rights.

The Ministry of Environmental Protection did not undertake all preventive measures to prevent or remove possible harmful consequences for the environment, the Protector of Citizens determined, and it considers that the acting inspection authority was obliged to consider the ban on the execution of the project and the performance of the company's activities until the consent on the impact assessment study of the competent authority is obtained, that is, until the results of the possible damage measurement are obtained.

For this reason, it issued a recommendation to the ministry to, through the republic environmental protection inspector, consider imposing a ban on the implementation of the project in question until the consent of the competent authority is obtained, as well as to consider submitting appropriate applications to the competent authority.

After the conducted investigation, the Protector of Citizens determined that the Ministry of Health did not act on the request of the Higher Public Prosecutor's Office in Novi Sad for two and a half years, to conduct an extraordinary external quality check of professional work of health care workers from the Institute of Oncology of Vojvodina in Sremska Kamenica.

After the Protector of Citizens launched a control investigation into the work of the Ministry of Health, that authority issued a decision on the implementation of an extraordinary inspection of professional work in the mentioned institute, but even after three months, the inspection was not carried out.

The Protector of Citizens recommended to the Ministry of Health to immediately ensure that an extraordinary external inspection into the quality of professional work of the institute's health workers is carried out, and to act in the manner and within the deadlines prescribed by law in the future.