Several leading human rights NGOs from Macedonia issued a reaction to the Parliament and the Government of Republic of Macedonia on June 24, 2008, regarding the recent changes in the Law on Criminal Procedure and the Law on Interception of Communications, allowing special investigative measures (surveillance).
Foundation Open Society Institute – Macedonia , Association for Criminal Justice and Criminology of Macedonia and Helsinki Committee for Human Rights of the Republic of Macedonia expressed deep concern because of the fast-track adoption of changes in the legislation “without no expert discussion whatsoever.” These changes can turn Macedonia from a state based on a rule of law into a “police state unconcerned with respect of basic human rights and freedoms.”
As a result of expert analysis of the new legislation, the signatories stated: “Besides enlarging the possibility for implementation of special investigative procedures for crimes outside of the sphere of organized crime, these changes also allow wide preventive implementation of these measures, even in cases without reasonable doubt of hard crimes and corruption. These changes are not in line with the European and world human rights standards, nor are common as acceptable method for fighting crime and corruption.”
Similar manner of adoption of the new version of the Law on Interception of Communications is also expected these days. The current draft also incites serious concerns in regard of abuse of privacy.
NGO sector representatives require that adoption of this type of legislation must be accompanied with “widespread expert and scientific public discussion involving the institutions of the judiciary and the civil society, through a democratic process aiming to achieve reasonable balance between the efficiency in fighting crime and corruption, and the basic human rights of privacy.”
Metamorphosis Foundation also voices concern from the perspective of development of information society, especially because the changes in legislation do not define mechanisms for control and prevention of arbitrary abuse of the new powers, and because the minimum standards for public consultation with inclusion of all stakeholders have not been met during the drafting and adoption. New technologies enable easy ways for direct influence into the lives of the growing number of internet users in Macedonia, which can involve privacy abuse; therefore carrying out of the legislative process in an inclusive and transparent manner is of special importance.
So far Metamorphosis has performed numerous activities to raise awareness of both the citizens and the state institutions about the importance of privacy and safety in the context of use of information and communication technologies. These efforts involved organizing public discussions and publishing resources on privacy and information security. For the purpose of education of the children and youth, the brochure “You Decide” has been published, as well as the multilingual website on Child Safety on the Internet . Metamorphosis is a member of the association European Digital Rights – EDRI .
Popular Macedonian bloggers also voiced concern due to unexplained drastic increase of the state security budget (from about EUR 0.4 Million to over EUR 24 Million) and the changes in the Law on Criminal Procedure which provide extremely wide powers to implement surveillance. The links to such posts received high number of votes on the social bookmarking service Kajmak.ot.
The influential blog Vuna reacted : “…they raised the secret police budget 60 times. Nobody offered an explanation. I wonder if they work 60 times more secretive, or will they survey 60 times more people… This is an introduction to a dystopian scenario.”
The blogger Volan synthetised the information from the traditional media on the changes of the Law on Criminal Procedure via links and quotes in the post “‘The Big Ears’ – legalized… The Big Brother watches, listens and records – legally this time… ” providing space for discussion used by tens of readers who posted various comments.
