Source: Danas
Personal position
The pre-election campaign is getting into a full swing. We shall have more and more opportunities to face different concepts, programmes and ideas of the participants in the campaign, whose subject is fight against corruption. It is logical, even inevitable, that it reminds us that the free access to the information of public importance, as one of the forms of the democratic control of the public over the authorities, can give extremely good results in the fight against corruption. The possibility of achieving such results is not a supposition, but a reality, confirmed in an effective and remarkable way through the experience of some successful countries in transition, such as Slovenia, Estonia or Slovakia.It is not enough only to proclaim the right of the public to know. This is only the first necessary supposition. It is far more difficult to achieve the task by making the proclaimed a reality. This requires a proper contribution from both the general public and the authorities. The public, citizens, journalists, media, NGOs, political parties and all the others can contribute with a persistent and consistent insisting on consuming the proclaimed right, while the authorities can do that by at least correct relation towards its own obligations which are correlated to the rights of the public.
The right to free access to information was guaranteed by the law adopted at the end of 2004 and two years later it also got constitutional guarantees. It is not well known, but that only makes it more interesting - how are the things going with the realistic contribution to the affirmation and exercising of this right given by “both sides” - the citizens on the one hand, and the authorities on the other? While working on the Report on the Enforcement of the Law on Free Access to Information in 2007, which I submitted to the National Assembly, I have recently had an opportunity to get reminded of a myriad of data that may be relevant for assessing the relation of the citizens and the authorities towards the “obligation” to give their respective contributions to the affirmation of the free access to the information of public importance.
The first ones are saying that the right to free access to information is increasingly being used. The reports of the government agencies submitted to the Commissioner show that the number of requests for the access to information sent to the government agencies at different levels is over 50 per cent higher than in 2006 and at least 4.5 times higher than in 2005. The citizens are also persistent in their demands for the protection of their right; hence the number of pending cases, as well as the number of solved cases at the Office of the Commissioner during the past year was by around 30 per cent higher than in the previous year.
The others talk about the behaviour of the government agencies in a rather discouraging way. Unfortunately, there are many bad examples. As an illustration, suffice to give even one, I would say a shocking one. The law on free access to information explicitly and clearly regulates the manner in which a government agency acts upon a request for free access to information. In compliance with that, the agency is under obligation to provide the requested information without any delay and not later than within 15 days. It may possibly and on an exceptional basis fully or partially decline the request, but in that case it is under obligation to pass the decision on the rejection, to justify it and to inform the requesting party about the legal means at its disposal. Ignoring of a request is excluded and inadmissible, as well as its rejection through some informal procedures - verbal, conclusive acts, informal written, etc. Therefore, the law does not recognise a process situation known as “the silence of the administration” which is present in some other proceedings, and it even stipulates a tortuous liability and fines for such (not) acting.
In the light of this, what can we derive from the fact that out of 1,169 complaints which the Commissioner for information resolved last year in as much as 96 per cent of the cases the complaint was submitted precisely because the original request had been ignored? Therefore, barely four per cent of the government agencies who deprived the public of the right to know did this in the manner which was, leaving aside their justification, at least formally correct. And all of this is happening in the fourth year of the enforcement of the law, with a myriad of chances to have those responsible for the enforcement of the law educated, and with an explicit legal obligation for them to do that. It is no consolation that the vast majority of those who had originally withheld requested information eventually gave them after the intervention or upon the order of the Commissioner for Information. In connection with this, we should be reminded that the most frequent subject of public interest are the information that relate to different forms of disposing with the public funds and other public resources - public procurements, privatisation, concessions, etc. And it is precisely in connection with the requests for the access to these, most important information from the (anti)corruption point of view, that almost by the rule the resistance most frequently appeared. This goes to say that many, on “both sides,” recognise the great anticorruption potential of the right to free access to information. Admittedly, in a very different way - some as a chance and some as a danger. The frequent, almost panic-like fear of public of those who dispose with public funds and property shows in the best way that the assessment of truthfulness of the anticorruption positions held by the participants in the election game and the reality of the programmes and ideal with which they “confirm” these positions should greatly, or rather primarily, depend on their relation towards the right to free access to information. In fact, it should depend on whether they see the right of the citizens to know in principle everything about the work of the government as an undisputable issue, especially taking into account the role it may have in the fight against the corruption.
