29th Session of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe (Strasbourg, 20-22 October 2015)

State of the Local Democracy in Montenegro

Speech of Gaye Doganoglu (Turkey, EPP/CCE), co-rapporteur of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities

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Dear colleagues,

Our visit to Montenegro took place from 9 to 11 June of this year. The Congress delegation was composed by Henrik Brade Johanson, Veith Mehde, member of the Group of independent Experts and myself. During our three-day visit we had the chance to meet various interlocutors in Podgorica as well as the towns of Niksic, Tuzi and Danilovgrad. I think I can speak for both of us, if I say that those fruitful consultations allowed us to grasp well the current state of local democracy in Montenegro. I would like to take this opportunity to also thank the National Delegation of Montenegro for the excellent cooperation before, during and after our visit.

Montenegro only quite recently joined the Council of Europe, in 2007 to be precise. The report we are presenting to you today is the second on local democracy in Montenegro. Since the first visit of a Congress delegation in 2010, Montenegro has been granted candidate status by the European Union and strengthened its involvement with other international actors.

Especially the EU accession negotiations served as a steppingstone for several reform processes since our last visit, many of which actually deal with the field of public administration. Having said this, I would in particular like to draw your attention to the currently on-going public administration reform (AURUM). AURUM was launched in 2011 and sets a framework for important reforms in the field of public administration, public services, and last but not least local self-government. We could certainly witness the National authorities’ commitment to amend and enact new laws and work on strategies which broadly all fall within the framework of AURUM. One should mention the strategies for the professional development of civil servants, inter-municipal cooperation or the fight against corruption.

I would also like to emphasize at this point, that those reforms do in fact respond in many instances to the recommendations that were made following the last monitoring visit in 2010.

In the few years since its independence Montenegro made some promising efforts that permit us to conclude that generally, the situation of local democracy is in compliance with the Charter. The legal foundations for local self-government are duly in place in Montenegro and municipalities can accordingly exercise their right to self-government. Same goes for the legal protection of local self-government and the system of administrative supervision which are both in compliance with the Charter. Overall, we had the impression that the government is well aware of the remaining challenges and continuously works on initiatives to respond to those issues. Clearly, corruption remains such a challenge.

In fact the GRECO, which is the Council of Europe’s body dedicated to the fight corruption, recently published a relatively critical report on the state of corruption in Montenegro. We definitely agree with the fact that corruption remains one of the central challenges that the Montenegrin authorities need to deal with. However, let us not forget the progressive projects responding to corruption on the local level that are already in place in Montenegro. In particular, we considered the Strategy to Fight against Corruption and Organized Crime as a good initiative that illustrates the authorities’ commitment to deal with this issue on all levels of governance. The strategy obliges local authorities to develop action plans, suited to the local circumstances which are developed and monitored in cooperation with the central government and civil society. In our opinion, those action plans definitely constitute a best practice example, of which authorities in several of our countries could make use of.

Even if the situation of local democracy is thus not preoccupying, there are nevertheless points of improvements that my colleague Hendrik Johansen will now tell you in more detail about as well as our corresponding recommendations.