Abstract
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The right to public information (RTI) is of the key importance in a contemporary society and represents a fundamental principle of democracy and the rule of law. Through RTI, individual citizens or NGOs as beneficiaries acquire data influencing public governance and oversee the enforcement of the rule of law. In addition, as pursued by constitutional provisions and Freedom of Information acts (FOIA), a broad circle of authorities and private providers of public tasks are bound to disclose such data even proactively, unless there are legal grounds for any of specific exceptions. However, several analyses and comparative studies (e.g. Banisar 2006; Brandsma et al. 2010; Savino 2010, Galleta et al., 2015, Access Info Europe, Transparency International, GCRT, GRTI; Democracy Index, etc.) reveal that institutional and procedural guarantees highly influence how the law is implemented in practice. The relevant institutional elements include the impartiality and independence of an institution, sufficient resources and budgeting, accountability mechanisms, and similar. Likewise, the procedural elements include above all: procedural good administration rights, e.g. reasonable deadlines, the burden of costs, a balanced formality of a request and a reply, right to appeal, right to be heard and reasoning, etc. In the ex-socialist states of the CEE/SEE region, who have been at the different stages of the transition or have managed to achieve the effective democratic governance, the issue of the functioning of the rule of law and its subprinciple of transparency/access to information, is even more prominent and fragile.
This paper seeks to identify and analyze the institutional and procedural guarantees of the effective access to information in the CEE/SEE countries (Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania). The questions the paper seeks to answer is: a) to what extent the institutional and procedural guarantees of the access to information as defined by legal frameworks in selected countries confer to the international and EU standards; b) how are these implemented in practice and what are the features and main challenges in the implementation of designed legal frameworks.
In this paper, we intend to firstly address institutional framework for the protection of the right of access to information, indicating the level of independence of authorities such as information commissioners, agencies or ombudspersons, which is considered a key feature of effective protection of the right of access to information (e.g. model laws on access to information). Secondly, we intend to detect and analyze the procedural guarantees of the effective exercise of access to information, especially those related to the authorities bound by law, timeframes, costs, formalities of the requests, exclusions and judicial protection of the users of the right. Upon the construction of the indicators based on the literature and the recommended international standards, we intend to gather the empirical data by using methods of legal analysis, statistical data on the implementation of the RTI laws and the questionnaire sent to the institutions protecting the right to information.
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