Centre for Civic Education (CCE) points to a concerning pattern of coordinated obstruction by organisational units of the University of Montenegro (UoM) and the UoM Rectorate in responding to requests for free access to information concerning the salaries of academic staff, which constitutes a serious violation of the Law on Free Access to Information and the principles of transparency in the spending of public funds.
During February and March 2026, CCE submitted requests to all organisational units of UoM and the Rectorate, seeking data on systematisation, the number and structure of employees, recruitment procedures, as well as individual salaries and compensation of academic staff for December 2025 and January 2026.
Instead of acting in accordance with the law, a significant number of faculties and the Rectorate resorted to the same model: complete refusal, partial disclosure of data, or failure to implement their own decisions on partial access. Such conduct prevents oversight of public spending by an institution that should be teaching young people democratic standards, in which transparency should be highly valued.
As positive examples, CCE highlights eight faculties – the Faculty of Law, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Architecture, Biotechnical Faculty, Faculty of Economics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, and Faculty of Metallurgy and Technology – which properly submitted all requested salary data, including the names and surnames of employees. In contrast, six faculties opted for the blacklist of non-transparency – the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, Faculty of Political Sciences, Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Faculty of Maritime Studies, Faculty of Philology, and Faculty of Philosophy – all of which refused access to all salary-related data or failed to implement their own decisions on partial access. A middle-ground approach was attempted by the Music Academy, Faculty of Fine Arts, Faculty for Sport and Physical Education, Faculty of Medicine, Faculty of Tourism and Hotel Management, and the UoM Rectorate, which submitted incomplete data, most often without the names and surnames of employees to whom the salaries related.
Particularly illustrative is the example of the Faculty of Fine Arts, which submitted salary data for December 2025 including the names and surnames of employees, but withheld names in the data for January 2026. After CCE pointed out this inconsistency, the Faculty did not submit the missing January data but instead requested that the already submitted December data be “disregarded”, claiming that they had been submitted by mistake.
CCE’s questions triggered considerable turbulence within UoM and prompted internal consultations. This is also evidenced by the fact that, after one faculty denied CCE access to salary data for its employees, technical objections regarding previously submitted CCE requests emerged, followed by the arrival of standardised responses from other faculties and the Rectorate. Nearly identical wording, legal explanations, attempts at delaying procedures, and models of restricting access indicate that this was a coordinated attempt to deny the public insight into the spending of public funds.
Such conduct has no basis in the Law on Free Access to Information. Article 14, paragraph 1, item 2 clearly prescribes that restrictions on access for the purpose of privacy protection do not apply to data concerning funds allocated from public revenues, except in cases involving social benefits, healthcare, and unemployment protection. Salaries of employees at UoM are financed from public revenues and do not fall under any of these exceptions. Furthermore, Article 16 of the same law explicitly stipulates that the harm test is not conducted for information referred to in Article 14, paragraph 1, items 1 and 2, meaning that invoking privacy, personal data protection, or the harm test is not a legal argument, but rather an attempt to evade a legal obligation.
CCE did not request the unique personal identification numbers (JMBG) of academic staff, nor any other sensitive personal data. The requests concerned exclusively the names, surnames, and salary/compensation amounts paid from public funds. Without these data, there can be no genuine oversight of public spending, but only aggregate or anonymised tables that fail to show who was paid, on what basis, and how much.
The inconsistent practice additionally confirms the arbitrariness of such conduct. If eight faculties are able to submit the data in full, then there is no legal obstacle preventing the remaining faculties and the Rectorate from doing the same. The difference lies not in the law, but in the willingness of management structures to comply with it.
CCE has submitted appeals to the Agency for Personal Data Protection and Free Access to Information against decisions which we believe unlawfully denied or restricted access to information. We expect Agency to act efficiently and confirm that UoM faculties and the Rectorate cannot independently decide which part of public spending will be hidden from citizens. After all, the fact that the Faculty of Law, alongside seven other faculties, recognised the validity of our request speaks sufficiently to its legal foundation.
CCE calls on the Rector of UoM, professor Vladimir Božović, who previously criticised the lack of transparency of the former leadership, as well as other governing bodies of UoM, to clearly address this pattern of obstruction and ensure lawful conduct by all organisational units.
Jovana Radulović, Programme Assistant