Due to violation of the right to trial within a reasonable time, the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina upheld the appeal of Transparency International in BiH in the dispute against the Municipality of Novi Grad Sarajevo after six years of legal battle for access to public spending data.
Information was requested from municipal authorities regarding the amount of funds allocated to individuals, non-profit organizations, private companies, as well as sponsorship expenditures for 2016 and 2017. Although this information is of public importance and responsible authorities
The data was later provided, but such prolonged concealment of information hinders the monitoring of public spending, detection of irregularities, and sanctioning of potential conflicts of interest, which is becoming an increasingly common practice among public institutions. Consequently, TI BiH filed an appeal to the Constitutional Court of BiH, which concluded that neither the Municipality of Novi Grad Sarajevo nor the Cantonal Court in Sarajevo had a reasonable and logical explanation for such a lengthy procedure.
The Constitutional Court did not identify any fact or argument that could justify the length of the mentioned procedure, which was returned to the first-instance body of the Municipality for retrial following the Cantonal Court’s verdict. Taking into account its practice on this matter, the Constitutional Court considers that the length of the procedure was excessive and did not meet the “reasonable time” criterion, states the verdict.
Furthermore, the Constitutional Court determined that there is a systemic problem with resolving cases within a reasonable time before courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is a consequence of systemic deficiencies in organizing the judiciary and effective exercise of jurisdiction by various levels of public authority in this area, for which there is no effective legal remedy.
TI BiH has previously pointed out that numerous officials finance their own non-governmental organizations throughout almost their entire mandate unhindered, and detecting and reporting such cases of conflict of interest is difficult because certain institutions hide data for years. In one such case, TI BiH is still in dispute with the Ministry of Labor and Veterans’ Protection of RS, which is the largest provider of these grants, and which refuses to publish data about associations that misused these public funds more than five years ago.
All data received by TI BiH has been published in the database nvo.transparentno.ba, and by comparing them, it was determined that numerous public officials simultaneously head associations receiving budget funds. Additionally, TI BiH’s data shows that in the last two election cycles, over 800 election candidates were heading associations that received public funds.
