A11 Initiative: Repeal Damaging Law on Social Card

Photo: Beta/Milos Miskov

The A11 initiative for economic and welfare rights has assessed that, two years since the adoption of the Law on the Social Card, the society is not a step closer to a more just distribution of welfare benefits and that the law should be repealed.

In a statement, A11 claimed that at least 44,000 people had been left without the right to financial welfare benefits since the law came into effect, and that the most vulnerable citizens justifiably feared the Social Card Information System, which “relies” on an algorithm that is still unknown to the public. Due to the damaging effects of the law, A11 is advocating the repealing of this legal solution and an end to the implementation of the Information System.

The Social Card Registry contains in one location around 135 personal data of each user of welfare benefits, as well as of their relatives and so-called “connected persons.” The Serbian government and ministries have conceived the Social Card as a solution towards a more just redistribution of welfare benefits, insisting that there were a number of abuses in this field, while not revealing the exact information about who was behind the abuses and how and when they occurred.

The job of social workers has been reduced to processing the so-called notifications of amendments of an individual’s status, instead of working in the field and truly learning about the conditions the users of welfare benefits live in. The practice of the A11 initiative has shown that certain social workers even ignore the users’ efforts to prove that the system had made an error about their alleged income, although such errors leave them without any social support in overcoming poverty.