"This is a bill on censorship," said Antun Kapraljevic of the People's Party (HNS), objecting that the bill enabled an ordinary civil servant to declare information classified if he/she deemed it necessary.
Kapraljevic particularly objected to the fact that important issues regarding information security, such as background checks, would be regulated by subordinate legislation to be adopted only in a year or a year and a half.
The HNS will therefore not support the bill, he said.
Pero Kovacevic of the Party of Rights (HSP) agreed with the assessment that the bill was based on subordinate legislation, which made its implementation almost impossible.
Failure to regulate important national security issues by a law, instead of by subordinate legislation, would lead to situations where it would be impossible to say, for example, who should be vetted or who can order vetting, Kovacevic said.
Nenad Stazic of the Social Democrats (SDP) said that the bill was dangerous because it allowed the intelligence community to check whomever and whatever it wanted, without any supervision.
Kresimir Cosic of the ruling Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) supported the bill, warning that issues such as background checks and physical security did not fall within the system of information security as suggested by the bill, as well as that there existed no institutions to train persons working with classified information.
The parliament also briefly discussed the ratification of an agreement with the EU on the financing of two projects from the area of nuclear security.