Ahead of International Right to Know Day, observed on 28 September, the Centre for Civic Education (CCE) warns that the new Law on Free Access to Information will not, in itself, change the practices of institutions that delay, remain silent or only partially fulfil their obligations towards the public.
The new Law entered into force on 7 January 2026 and has been fully applicable since 7 July 2026. However, the reform began in a system already burdened by administrative silence, thousands of appeals and administrative disputes, a growing number of unresolved cases, and insufficient capacities of the institutions responsible for protecting this right.
Data from the Agency for Personal Data Protection and Free Access to Information (AZLP) illustrate the scale of the problem. During 2025, 7,481 requests for free access to information were submitted to public authorities, while the statutory 15-day deadline was exceeded in 2,180 cases (29%). In the same year, the AZLP received 4,769 appeals and issued decisions in 4,103 cases. Of the 2,330 appeals upheld, 1,209 (or 52%) concerned violations of procedural rules, namely administrative silence. Even more concerning is the growing backlog before the AZLP. According to data from its information system, the number of unresolved appeals increased from 90 in 2020 to as many as 2,768 in 2025. Such growth over a six-year period points to a structural problem in the system for protecting the public’s right to know.
In its 2025 Report on Montenegro, the European Commission noted significant challenges in this area, as well as insufficient human, financial and IT capacities of the AZLP. As the report reflected the situation as of 1 September 2025, before the adoption of the new Law, these assessments represent the baseline for the reform rather than an evaluation of the effects of the new legislative solutions. It is precisely this already overburdened system that has now been entrusted with additional responsibilities in the areas of supervision, enforcement of decisions and misdemeanour proceedings.
However, the problem does not end with the AZLP. According to data presented publicly by the President of the Administrative Court, Miodrag Pešić, around 4,500 lawsuits concerning administrative silence were filed with that court from the beginning of 2026 to mid-July, the majority of them relating to the AZLP’s failure to act. This prolongs the path to obtaining information, from the first-instance authority, through the AZLP, to the Administrative Court, while increasing both costs and the burden on the entire system.
CCE notes that the new Law introduces important improvements – it expands the range of information that authorities are required to publish proactively, requires information to be easily accessible and available in machine-readable and open formats, and introduces a more concrete mechanism for enforcing AZLP decisions. For the first time, fines are also prescribed for failure to publish information proactively – ranging from EUR 500 to EUR 20,000 for a legal entity and from EUR 200 to EUR 2,000 for the responsible person within an authority.
At the same time, CCE draws attention to the provision contained in Article 49 of the new Law, under which, in an administrative dispute initiated due to administrative silence, each party bears its own costs. This means that part of the consequences of an institution’s unlawful failure to act may ultimately fall on the citizen, journalist or non-governmental organisation forced to initiate proceedings because the authority failed to act within the statutory deadline. This may make access to judicial protection particularly difficult for those who lack the financial means to pursue administrative disputes.
Attention should also be paid to the fact that the new Law expands the range of grounds for restricting access to information. More precise regulation may contribute to legal predictability, but it also creates room for a more restrictive interpretation of the right of access to information unless public authorities consistently apply the harm test and the public interest test and clearly explain why disclosure of a specific piece of information would cause serious and certain harm. It will be important to see whether the prescribed exemptions are applied narrowly, on an individual basis, and with publicly verifiable reasoning.
The status of secondary legislation constitutes an additional cause for concern. Article 61 stipulated that the relevant by-laws be adopted within six months of the Law’s entry into force, i.e. by 7 July 2026, particularly those concerning the information system, open data and technical standards for publication. More than two months after the expiry of that deadline, clear and systematised information on which acts have been adopted and to what extent this process has been completed is still not publicly available. This may lead to inconsistent interpretations of the obligations of public authorities and insufficient technical preparedness for the implementation of certain legislative provisions.
CCE recalls that a good law is only as effective as its implementation. If authorities continue to remain silent, miss deadlines or publish documents in ways that make them difficult to find and use, while oversight and the prescribed sanctions remain merely possibilities on paper, the reform will not deliver the change that the public has the right to expect.
The first test of the new Law will be the answer to a simple question: are citizens, journalists and civil society organisations receiving accurate and complete information within the prescribed deadline? The data available so far do not yet provide grounds for concluding that this objective has been achieved.
The results of the reform must be measurable through concrete outcomes – fewer cases of administrative silence and a smaller backlog of appeals, shorter proceedings, a higher percentage of responses provided within the statutory deadline, better-quality proactive disclosure, consistent enforcement of AZLP decisions, and the sanctioning of violations of the Law.
The public’s right to know will become a reality only when institutions publish information before anyone has to request it, respond within the prescribed deadlines and enforce decisions granting access to information.
Mira Popović Trstenjak, Democratisation and Europeanisation Programme Coordinator