Suchergebnisse

The paper discusses the role of the European Parliament in the inter-institutional quest for power on the ground of the effectiveness of its control over the supra- national institutions and bodies with the intelligence function as well as in the protection of the right to privacy. The starting assumption is that, despite the Lisbon reform, the powers and jurisdiction of the European Parliament are still quite limited with a view to oversight of the EU policy implementation and the performance of the EU institutions, respectively. The author examines the following cases: the recently revealed practice of massive electronic surveillance of the EU citizens' communication, the unselective processing of personal data, and the semi-secretive set up of a supranational intelligence function out of the MEPs' reach. The analyzed cases show that the European Parliament's control powers are weak when it comes to the issues that demand a narrow technical expertise, but still can endanger civil rights. The author concludes that the protection of the right to privacy can indicate the real power of the Parliament in future dynamics of the supranational institutional framework.

In Croatia, the issue of the legal status of the sources of journalists' formation as well as the status of journalists who publish sensitive information is increasingly gaining prominence. This is a subject which includes elements of constitutional, media, labour, civil, and penal law. The essay is limited to people as information sources. The sources can be divided into internal and external. The rationale for the sources' confidentiality privilege lies in the fact that journalists serve public goals and their sources can find themselves imperilled. According to the author's classification, the risks of this privilege are faced either by the sources (direct or indirect manipulation, smear campaigns, misapprehensions) or by the journalists ("protecting" a fictional source, subsequent blackmail of the source, misapprehensions). In Croatia, the protection of the information sources is defined in Article 12 of the Law on Public Information. The author outlines the major comparative systems of regulation of this field, the examples of antinomies among different Croatian regulations (the principles for their resolution are also offered) and analyses the position of certain types of sources in relation to the Croatian law. And finally, the author compares the regulations of the Croatian law with the comparative systems, analyses the representation of certain forms of responsibility of certain types of subjects and lists the principles he deems most important regarding journalists' work (the necessity of protecting the sources, the responsibility of journalists towards their sources, the different legal statu of journalists and their sources, the protection of privacy, the verification confidentiality, the more dominant interest, the importance of administrative ethics, the familiarity with the regulations, the adequate legal definition of a secret). (SOI : PM: S. 228)