Letter to Mr. Zenka regarding the Decision on the allocation of funds for financing projects / programs of non-governmental organizations in the field of protection and promotion of human and minority rights, protection of the rights of Roma and Egyptians for 2020

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Tuesday, 24 November 2020 14:30

Respected Mr. Zenka,

I am addressing you on behalf of the NGO Young Roma, which has been working for 15 years on the improvement of the position of the Roma community in Montenegro.

 In this regard, please reconsider or, as a last resort, annul the Decision on the allocation of funds for financing projects / programs of non-governmental organizations in the field of protection and promotion of human and minority rights, protection of the rights of Roma and Egyptians for 2020 considering that the allocation of funds by this Decision was not done in accordance with the law and in the public interest.

Bearing in mind the work of all organizations in Montenegro that deals with issues of the Roma community, and whose work we closely monitor, we express reasonable doubt that the adoption of this Decision was accompanied by utterly non-transparency in decision-making, partiality, thus violating the law, and which indicates on certain corrupt practices during the process of making this Decision.

Insight into the adopted Decision, as well as in the previous ones from 2019 and 2018, we note that most of the same organizations or interconnected, receive projects, and whose work is not transparent, which casts doubt on the fact that the funds were not spent for the intended purpose, and that the results of supported projects do not make a concrete contribution to Roma inclusion. Some organizations have been established almost recently, two of which in previous year, so it is unclear on the basis of which criteria you have determined their capacities for project implementation.

What concern us the most is the fact that the work of most of the mentioned organizations is not recognized among the Roma community itself, which once again calls into question the way these projects are implemented.

Based on our research (about which we can inform you in detail), most organizations conduct their work in a very non-transparent manner. Apart from the information that we can find on your site that they received funds, there is no other public information about the implemented projects of these organizations. Based on the Public Call, one of the criteria for funding is transparency, project/program quality, as well as the capacity of the NGO, therefore, by this decision, the above criteria were not met by most organizations that received funds by the last Decision of the Ministry.

We request that you inform the public which projects these organizations have implemented, as well as how these projects have been implemented in the past period, but also to what extent these projects have influenced the improvement of the position of the Roma community. By providing this information, you would remove all possible suspicions that there was a misuse of public resources and misuse of funds from the budget of Montenegro. We note that in the past three years, 482,000 euros have been allocated from the same budget to finance NGO projects.

Therefore, we sent a Request for free access to information to the Ministry of Human and Minority Rights of the Government of Montenegro, through which we requested insight into the reports (narrative and financial) of realized projects for 2018 and 2019, because most information about realized projects is not publicly available.This Request was rejected on the grounds that it would thus provide information that is not in the interest of personal data protection, which is contrary to the Law itself.

In this regard, our NGO sent a complaint to the Agency for Personal Data Protection and Free Access to Information that pursuant to Article 14 of the Law on Free Access to Information (Official Gazette of Montenegro; No.44/12 and 30/17) which states that the authority body is obliged to provide access to the information by submitting a copy of it to the applicant, after deleting the part of the information to which access is restricted, to make a decision and to provide us with the requested information after deleting the disputed information, to whom and in what way the funds from the budget in the mentioned years were spent for the mentioned activities.

We would like to inform you that the NGO Young Roma - Herceg Novi in last period has analysed, in detail, the work of all NGOs in Montenegro, whose projects have addressed the issues of the Roma population. The method of obtaining projects, the quality of implementation and the justification of projects financed from the Budget of Montenegro is very questionable for certain organizations.

Kind regards,

Samir Jaha, executive director