Belgrade, February 2023. After the withdrawal of the Draft Law on Internal Affairs due to numerous objections from civil society organizations, and especially due to the short deadline for public discussion of a set of six police laws and also due to the introduction of non-selective biometric recording and processing of data from public places, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MoI ) prepared a new draft and organized a second round of consultative meetings (four) with representatives of civil society (the articles related to biometric recording and data processing were not subject to consultation, as the MoI needs more time to consider their changes).

The Autonomous Women's Center proposed amendments to 15 articles of the new Draft Law on Internal Affairs, which mainly related to the types of police powers, specifying the provisions on police actions in situations of reporting incidents of domestic violence, confiscation of weapons from police officers reported for domestic violence, protection of victims and witnesses of criminal acts, regulation of polygraph examination, i.e. prohibition of this type of examination when it comes to minor injured persons and witnesses, as well as victims who could have a sensitive witness status. During the consultations, the Ministry of Interior accepted one proposal of the AWC (Art. 28), two proposals were partially accepted in formal aspects (Art. 51 and 71), and 12 proposals for amendments to the new Draft Law on Internal Affairs were rejected. There was no written explanation for AWC's rejected proposals.

AWC will not give up on proposals for amendments to at least three articles - Art. 51 regarding the return of confiscated weapons, Art. 71 in connection with the introduction of restrictions regarding the receipt of applications from minors and Art. 155 regarding polygraph examination.  

 The first draft of the Law on Internal Affairs withdrawn from the public debate in December 2022 can be viewed HERE.

 You can see the comments and suggestions of the AWC HERE.