At the 24th sitting, the parliamentary Committee on Administrative, Budgetary, Mandate and Immunity issues considered, for the first time, complaints on breaches of the recently adopted MPs Code of Conduct. The Committee rejected all five complaints from the agenda as ungrounded. 

During the sitting, where all the MPs who spoke were from the SNS parliamentary group “Aleksandar Vucic - For Our Children”, the Committee rejected complaints for violations filed by activist from the Open Parliament and CRTA against Marko Atlagic, Nebojsa Bakarec, Vladimir Orlic and Aleksandar Martinovic, as well as one by Transparency Serbia, filed against the Committee on Constitutional and Legislative Issues. 

During the discussion, these MPs not only denied the allegations against them, but they repeatedly stated that the complaints were malicious and filed in order to discredit them. 

In his address, MP Marko Atlagic said that CRTA should not “teach him, a proud Serb, how to speak Serbian in the Serbian Parliament”. He stated that he “did not violate the Code, nor use expressions offensive to MPs from the Shiptar national minority, by using the term Shiptar”, and as evidence - he quoted the vocabulary. 

MP Nebojsa Bakarec said he believes “mass” complaints by CRTA are aimed at “flooding the Assembly and intimidating MPs”, and that he has studied the complaints and determined they are unfounded. Bakarec sees no threat in his statement “Do you know how they solve this in Russia? Well, in Russia you’d be gone, that’s how they solve it”, but he does see satanization in “Djilas-like media”. He said he fears the Administrative Committee will be flooded by these complaints, and it will have to hold “24 hour” sittings. 

MP Vladimir Orlic said that this is a political confrontation, that he does not plan to refrain from using his vocabulary, which the Committee does not deem controversial. He added that this is an “organized hunt on MPs” and a “dirty propaganda campaign”.

Committee Chairman Aleksandar Martinovic who, per the Code of Conduct, should sanction himself, stated that the call to “hit the sack until it tears apart” was a metaphor, and that there are no grounds for breaches of the Code there. 

In the discussion that followed, MPs supported their partisan colleagues, repeated how it is not a good thing that any citizen can file a complaint, and some even suggested finding a way to sanction those whom the Committee deems have misused the Code by filing complaints.

Today, the Administrative Committee considered complaints on breaches to the Code of Conduct for the first time, and it clearly demonstrated that adopting the Code in this sort of convocation was a farce and a simulation of democracy.