No. 07-00-488/15-02   Date: 28 December, 2015

OPINION

The opinion was issued in the procedure following complaint from S.B.P. filed against the Command of the Gendarmerie, for discrimination on grounds of sex and marital and family status. The complaint states that S. B. P. a single mother of a child under the age of seven, employed in the Ministry of Interior, in the health care service in the Second Detachment of the Gendarmerie, at the post of a doctor, and that she was proposed to be transferred to the future Human Resources Sector, where she would be paid half the salary for the same work, losing the status of a uniformed authorised officer and beneficial years of work. It also states that she was told that the reason for not going to the area in the Land Security Zone was that she was a woman and, therefore, she did not correspond to the needs of the service. The declaration states that it is true that S. B. P. was proposed to be transferred to the future sector because her previous performance results were weaker than the performance results of other doctors in the Second Detachment, that is, she was less productive and functional compared to other employed doctors in that detachment, given that the last six, seven years she did not take part in the execution of special security tasks in the area of the LSZ, as well as in other one-day and several-day engagements outside the headquarters of the Unit Detachment, and that the fact that she was a mother of a minor did not influence the decision. During the procedure, it was established that in the Ministry of Interior of the Republic of Serbia, in accordance with the reform process, a new Human Resources Sector would be formed and that the Command of the Gendarmerie made a proposal for the deployment of employees in the future sector, where 12 women out of the 14 proposed were on the list, among whom was S. B. P. Since during the procedure the employer did not provide an objective and reasonable justification for the proposal of relocating S. B. P. to the future Human Resources Sector, the Commissioner for the Protection of Equality issued the opinion that the Command of the Gendarmerie, by proposing a more unfavorable transfer of S. B. P. from the Gendarmerie to the Human Resources Sector, made indirect discrimination based on sex and family status, and the Command of the Gendarmerie was recommended to take all necessary measures to eliminate the consequences of discriminatory treatment of the employee S. B. P.