No. 07-00-648/15-02  Date: 14 January, 2016

OPINION

The opinion was issued in the procedure following complaint from N.R. filed against the Command of the Gendarmerie, for discrimination on grounds of sex and marital and family status. The complaint states that N.R. is a mother of two minors and employed in the Ministry of Interior, in health care service in the Third Detachment of the Gendarmerie, at a 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. The declaration states that it is true that N.R. 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 Third 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 Land Security Zone, 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 two minors did not influence the decision. During the procedure, it was established that in the Ministry of Interior of the Republic of Serbia 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 N.R. Since during the procedure the employer did not provide an objective and reasonable justification for the proposal of relocating N.R. 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 N.R. 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 N.R.