Last day of the working week, and the Parliament is still trying to convince the opposition to participate in the drafting of the draft-amendments for the constitutional changes. Eight MPs, on the other hand, from the VMRO-DPMNE parliamentary group who voted for the constitutional changes, are still agreeing on the further manner of acting in the Parliament. The forming of another parliamentary group in parliament, to which they have the right, should, probably, be become official by Monday.

From SDSM’s parliamentary group they say that time is being left for opposition MPs to join the consultations, even though they are expressing pessimism that it will happen. If that does not happen, in the consultations, they say, the new parliamentary group eventually will be included.

The Government today made a decision to form a Commission on transfer of the technical devices for communications surveillance and the technical documents from the Agency for Security and Counter-Intelligence (UBK) to the Operational Technical Agency (OTA), which

was formed by a separate law with the purpose of reforming the process of communications surveillance in order to prevent further misuses in implementing these measures.

The Commission, comprised of representatives of the MOI, OTA, the Supreme Court, Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Directorate for Security of Classified Information, as well as the Commission on supervising the implementation of the special investigative measure surveillance of communications, has the task to determine the current state of the technical devices for communication surveillance, as well as of the technical documents that are being transferred from the UBK to the OTA, to prepare a register of all active communication surveillance measures, as well as to prepare a record of the executed task. The Parliament last month, with 83 votes “for”, named Zoran Angelovski as Head of the newly-formed agency. CIVIL – C center for Freedom today awarded five more prizes for the most successful and most influential stories of citizen journalists within the framework of the “CivicLenses” project.

This time the awarded stories are about the environmental problems and urban chaos, as well as about the violence and hate speech that were ever more present in this recent period, given the political and social situation in the country.

B. Jordanovska