almanac on security sector oversight in the Western Balkans

4.5. Constitutional Court
Macedonia
Throughout the last nine years the Constitutional Court has acted on many complaints
regarding conformity of laws on internal affairs, police and rulebooks with the constitution.
As a result, the court has struck down different provisions on eight occasions. 94
Because its rulings are binding the Court has direct control over the activities of legislative
and executive branches. However lawmakers have not respected court decisions
in all cases where the court has dismissed legal provisions. For example, despite ruling
out Article 29 from the 1995 Law on Internal affairs because of a conflict with Article
12 of the Constitution, lawmakers later enacted the same provisions in Article 50 of
the 2006 Law on Police (Institute for Human Rights, 2011b). The Court has dealt with
only very few complaints concerning protection of human rights because of its limited
competence in this area and because many appeals are badly prepared and declared
inadmissible (Institute for Human Rights, 2011a).
5 . Oversight and control – Intelligence services
As a legacy of the communist past and the nature of their work, intelligence services
remain the least transparent security actors. Twenty years after independence, intelligence
services are seldom open to those having the right to scrutinise them. This
can be observed in the work of the Directorate for Security and Counter Intelligence
(DSCI) which, apart from having competences to perform counterintelligence activities,
is entitled to use police powers. The oversight bodies, especially parliament and
the Ombudsman, perform only pro forma oversight, meaning there is no substance
in the oversight they are practicing. As an example, in the history of the work of the
parliamentary body responsible for oversight of the Intelligence Agency (IA) and the
DSCI, it has only once performed an investigation visit to the IA and never to the DSCI
or the Army Intelligence and Counter Intelligence Unit (Rahikj, 2011).
5.1. Parliament
Two parliamentary committees monitor the security and intelligence agencies: (1) The
Committee for Supervising the Work of the Intelligence Agency and the Security and
Counter Intelligence Directorate (Committee Supervising Intelligence Agencies), and
(2) the Committee for Supervision of the Application of Communication Interception
Techniques by MoI and MoD (Committee Supervising Communication Interception).
94 The rulings derived from the Laws on Internal Affairs, Law on Execution of Sanctions as well as the
rulebook on police work.
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Almanac on Security Sector Oversight in the Western Balkans