Legal Acts in English

This Law regulates the rights to access information of public importance held by public authority bodies, with the purpose of the fulfilment and protection of the public interest to know and attain a free democratic order and an open society.

In order to implement the right to access information of public importance, held by public authority bodies, a Commissioner for Information of Public Importance shall be established (hereinafter: Commissioner) by this Law, as an autonomous state body, independent in fulfilling its authority.

For the purpose of enabling the exercising the interest of the public to be provided knowledge about, all public authority bodies should make public and thus make available to the public all information about their work which, in accordance with the provisions of this Law, shall be considered information of public importance.

All terms used in this Law used in the grammatical masculine gender shall imply the natural masculine and feminine gender of the person to whom they refer.

Information of public importance, within the meaning of this Law, is information held by a public authority body, created during work or related to the work of the public authority body, contained in a document, and related to everything that the public has a justified interest to know.

Information of public importance held by a public authority body shall denote the following notwithstanding: whether the source of information is a public authority or another person; the information medium (paper, tape, film, electronic media, et al) containing the document with the information; the date of creation of information; the manner of obtaining information; or another feature of information.

In terms of this Law, a public authority body (hereinafter: public authority) shall denote notably:

1) body of the Republic of Serbia;

2) body of the autonomous province;

3) body of the municipality, city, city municipality and the city of Belgrade;

4) a public enterprise, institution, organization and other legal entity, which is established by a regulation or decision of the body referred to in items 1) to 3) of this paragraph;

5) a company whose founder or member is the Republic of Serbia, the autonomous province, a unit of local self-government, or one or more public authorities referred to in item 1) to 4) of this paragraph with 50% or more shares or stakes in the sum or with more than half of the members of the management body;

6) a company whose founder or member is one or more public authorities referred to in items 1) to 5) of this paragraph with 50% or more shares or stakes in the sum;

7) a legal entity whose founder is a company referred to in item 5) or 6) of this paragraph;

8) a legal entity or an entrepreneur performing activities of general interest, in terms of the law governing the position of public enterprises, in relation to information relating to the performance of such activities;

9) a legal or natural person having public powers, in relation to information related to the exercise of such powers;

10) a legal entity that in the year to which the requested information relates shall generate more than 50% of the income from one or more authorities referred to in item 1) to 7) of this paragraph, in relation to information related to the activity financed by those revenues, except for the church and a religious community.