The Office of the Protector of Human Rights and Freedoms of Montenegro (Ombudsman) called. During the first nine months of the year, authorities reported three inmate deaths, all from natural causes. It operated under the supervision of the Ministry of the Interior and was generally effective.
The government reported about 16,000 refugees and internally displaced persons who were in the country as a result of the 1990s wars in Yugoslavia. This program has helped approximately 500 people (out of the estimated 1,200 in need) to obtain Kosovo passports during the first 11 months of the year. In a two-month move during the year, the government registered only seven people as stateless out of 486 people who applied for the status.
Towards the end of the year, the Ministry of the Interior issued temporary travel documents to these stateless persons.
Freedom to Participate in the Political Process
Temporary protection: The government provided temporary protection to migrants and asylum seekers, providing it to approximately 1,570 persons during the year. After meeting the requirement that they apply for asylum, they could stay in the country until authorities adjudicated their applications. According to UNHCR, there were no legally recognized stateless persons in the country, but several thousand individuals were de facto stateless.
The most common problem for them, especially Roma, Ashkali and Balkan Egyptians born in the country or in Kosovo, was a lack of personal documentation, especially birth and civil registration documents. Parliament elected the new State Electoral Commission chairman on October 8, months after the legal deadline of April 2014. Membership of a ruling coalition party reportedly conferred advantages in employment of public servants and in the private sector.
Some civil activists have accused the ruling party of misappropriating state funds for unfair electoral benefits. The non-governmental organization Center for Democratic Transition accused that social allowances increased significantly during election years and called on the authorities to investigate all cases of possible abuse of social allowances to obtain illegal electoral benefits, especially in Pljevlje and Rožaj. On August 12, the Parliament established the Commission for Monitoring the Implementation of Electoral Legislation with the aim of restoring trust in the electoral process.
All minority groups had representatives in parliament except Roma, Ashkali and Balkan Egyptians, who remained unrepresented despite a law providing for it. The law also provides for positive discrimination at the municipal level for minorities that make up from 1.5 to 15 percent of the population. There were no political representatives of Roma, Ashkali, or Balkan Egyptians at the municipal level (see section 6, . National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities).
Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government
On October 2, the Council of the Agency appointed a retired police officer, Sreten Radonjic, who was a former assistant minister and head of the police's criminal department, as director of the Anti-Corruption Agency. For example, on August 13, the police arrested 13 local officials of Budva municipality, including Budva acting mayor Lazar Radjenovic, former mayor Rajko Kuljaca, former deputy mayor Dragan Marovic, city manager Milena Marovic-Bogdanovic and Aleksandar Ticic, an adviser to the prime minister, suspected of embezzling several million euros from the municipal budget of Budva. On December 17, police arrested Svetozar Marovic, a senior official of the ruling DPS, suspected of involvement in corruption and an organized crime group that embezzled millions of dollars from Budva's municipal budget.
On November 16, the Special Prosecutor's Office opened an investigation into former directors of Crnogorski Telekom, Oleg Obradovic and Miodrag Ivanovic, who are accused of being involved in a 7.3 million euro ($8 million) corruption scheme during the sale of the state-owned company to in 2005. telecom. MANS reported that in 2014, 59 state institutions and local governments violated the legal requirement that direct transactions that bypass the formal procurement process not exceed 10 percent of the annual procurement value. Some NGOs claimed that some legal entities were not properly audited because of their ties to the ruling elite.
Violations of the obligation to present and disclose are subject to administrative or criminal sanctions. According to the KPCK, 635 officials who are subject to the request for income declaration have incorrectly reported their income during the first eight months of the year. The CPCI declined to release to the media the names of the officials it fined, citing a decision by the Personal Data Protection Agency that prohibits disclosure without the express consent of the persons concerned.
The NGO Center for Democratic Transition (CDT), which monitors the transparency of government institutions, reported in July that, unlike the previous year, prosecutors' offices at all levels were among the most transparent institutions in the country. According to the CDT, prosecutors published 99 percent of all information as required by law. Individuals whose request for information is rejected may appeal to the Agency for the Protection of Personal Data, which usually sides with the appellant.
Governmental Attitude Regarding International and
The CDT alleged that the Agency for the Protection of Personal Data did not have sufficient capacity to monitor the agencies that did not respond to requests for information. The level of access did not differ for non-citizens or for the foreign or domestic press. When government information was available, individuals generally had free access to it, but there were specific cases where processing fees had to be paid to cover service costs for the institution providing the information.
The ombudsman can propose new laws, request the Constitutional Court to determine whether a law violates the constitution or treaty obligations, assess particular human rights problems at the request of a competent body, address in general. The government and the courts generally implemented the ombudsman's recommendations, although often with administrative delays. During its July 1 meeting, the National Anti-Discrimination Council noted that the Office of the Ombudsman did not use its full authority to deal with some cases of alleged discrimination.
The non-governmental organization Center for Civic Education criticized the work of the current Ombudsman as slow and ineffective. The Alternative Institute called on the DZ not to re-elect the Ombudsman after the end of his mandate. The non-governmental organization Action for Human Rights accused the president of avoiding the required consultations with non-governmental organizations on the re-election of the ombudsman and of blaming the Ministry of Human Rights for his decision. and minority rights.
Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons
In a statement in September, the resident representative of the UN Development Program expressed concern that one in three women in the country was a victim of physical or some other form of domestic abuse at some point in her life. NGOs operated three shelters for victims of domestic violence -- two in the central part of. In the first 11 months of the year, 470 victims of domestic violence stayed in the shelter of the NGO "Safe House for Women".
The consequence of these factors was that men tended to be favored in the distribution of ownership. In Balkan Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian communities, traditional values, societal prejudices and the tendency to drop out of school prematurely limited educational opportunities for women. Sometimes the authorities placed minor victims of domestic violence in the children's correctional institution in Ljubovic or the orphanage in Bijela.
The Ombudsman noted progress in the efforts of the police and social centers to prevent begging (see section 7.c.). On January 27, the Jewish Community, the Ministry of Human and Minority Rights and the Ministry of Education and Sports organized a commemoration of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Slobodan Skerovic High School in Podgorica. Observers attributed this reluctance to a lack of confidence in the legal system based on unfavorable outcomes of previous court cases or, according to
Disabled people, under the leadership of the Minister of Labor and Social Welfare, who is responsible for the policy of protecting the rights of disabled people. According to the 2011 census, Roma, Ashkali and Balkan Egyptians made up about 1 percent of the population. According to government statistics, Roma, Ashkali and Balkan Egyptians made up 4 percent of the working-age population, with 1,326 of them registered with the state.
Leaders of other ethnic minority communities continued to claim that they were underrepresented in parliament, government administration, the judiciary and government-owned economic enterprises. An August study by the Ministry of Human and Minority Rights showed a large imbalance in ethnic distribution in several categories of public sector jobs, including prosecutorial and judicial functions.
Worker Rights
None of the protections available to workers legally registered with the State Employment Agency applied to unregistered workers, many of whom came from abroad and did not have contracts. Children under the age of 18 cannot engage in work that requires hard physical work; overtime; night, underground or underwater work; or work that "may have a harmful effect or involve increased risk to their health and life". The government generally enforced these restrictions on the formal economy, but not the informal. The Labor Inspectorate had no child labor inspectors and investigated compliance with child labor law only as part of a general labor inspection regime.
In addition to forced begging, inspectors found 25 children aged 15-18 working in the informal economy without regular employment contracts, mostly during the summer. They placed unaccompanied child labor victims in the children's correctional institution in Ljubovic. Roma NGOs tried to raise awareness of the problem and suggested that the government was not providing enough resources to rehabilitate children who beg and live on the streets.
The government generally did not enforce these laws and regulations effectively, and there were instances of discrimination on these grounds. A significant portion of the working population, especially in rural areas and the informal sector, earned less than the minimum wage. The Labor Inspectorate is responsible for enforcing laws on wages, working hours and occupational health and safety, but has failed to do so effectively in both the formal and informal sectors.
Many workers, especially women in the commercial, catering and service industries, worked unpaid overtime, and employers sometimes forced them to work on religious holidays without additional compensation or to waive their rights to weekly and annual leave . About 200,000 persons worked in the formal sector and an estimated 35,000, mostly young persons, were employed in the informal economy. Both employers and workers violated health and safety rules, especially in the construction, electric power, woodworking and welding industries.
