The Human Rights Action is protesting the parties’ struggle over control of the Police Administration and the violation of the Law on Internal Affairs (LIA) in the process of appointing the Acting Director of the Police Administration.

The Police Administration must be a professional, politically and ideologically neutral service of all the citizens, and not a prey of any party – especially those that present themselves as being democratic and pro-European.

The LIA stipulates that, on the proposal of the Minister of Internal Affairs, the Government shall appoint as acting Director of Police the head of one of the internal organisational units who meets the requirements for said position (Article 16).

However, last night, the Government first decided that the Prime Minister has the right to propose an acting official, and then adopted his proposal instead of that which was made by the Minister, although no regulation exists that would give the Government the right to act that way. The only thing the Government could have done last night was not to appoint the acting official. The Prime Minister, on the other hand, could have asked the Minister to resign, or propose to the Assembly to dismiss him.

An entire series of improvisations, unfounded in law, was in fact initiated much earlier, by the decision of the Minister of Internal Affairs to announce a competition for the acting director and subject the candidates who applied to polygraph test, despite the fact that the Law does not provide for such a procedure.

Regrettably, this is obviously a ruthless party struggle for control of the police, although it is prescribed that the work of this institution must be politically and ideologically neutral (LIA, Article 14). In such circumstances, we can only wander who it is that would benefit from such, professional police force, and who from the extended influence of criminal clans on its work?!

The fact that the price paid for these political and legal improvisations could be the loss of a historic chance for Montenegro’s imminent acceptance into the European Union is a particular cause for concern.