The authorities continue to hamper the access to information of a public character and one of the causes is the imperfect and outdated legal framework. The representatives of the media and NGOs repeatedly proposed reviewing the law on access to information, signaling multiple cases when public entities ignore the legal provisions, refusing to offer information on the pretext for protecting personal data, state and commercial secret. The situation concerning decisional transparency is also alarming. A part of the draft laws with a major impact on public interest haven’t been discussed with the public. The situation concerning corruption fighting hasn’t improved. Even if the country overcame state capture, the new rulers took over some of the criminal schemes, while Parliament brutally violated the rigors of decisional transparency, adopting laws that run counter to the public interest, says a report by Transparency International – Moldova that was presented by Ianina Spinei in a news conference at IPN.
As regards decisional transparency, a part of the bills with a major impact on the public interest didn’t pass the anticorruption risk assessment of the National Anticorruption Center, being adopted by the rulers in an alert regime. Among these are the state budget for 2021 and the bill to abrogate the billion law. The representatives of civil society condemned the worsening of the quality of the act of governance, drawing attention to the fact that the given laws undermine the public budget, endanger the relationship with the development partners and risk destabilizing the macro-financial situation in the country. As to the fight against corruption, only about half of the actions of the Action Plan for implementing the National Integrity and Anticorruption Strategy were fully implemented. The authorities didn’t take real measures to hold accountable those involved in the bank theft and the officials who allowed the fraud to be committed, says Transparency International – Moldova’s report.
Ianina Spinei noted the way in which the open government action plan for 2019-2020 was analyzed leaves to be desired. For example, the subaction to increase transparency of the activity of economic entities with state capital by publishing the results of the financial monitoring is considered fulfilled, but the results of the monitoring of about 40 state-run enterprises performed by TI-Moldova show that a part of these ignore the legal requirements on access to information, usually secretizing the remuneration of the managers and members of the administration bodies, information about conflicts of interest, made purchases or inspection results. Even if the legislation stipulates the necessity of publishing information about the activity of enterprises on their websites, the websites contain consistent information only in rare cases.
In connection with the findings, Transparency International – Moldova recommend including in the open government action plan actions typical of the set objectives that would be measurable and achievable, relevant to the principles of open government, reviewing the legal framework concerning the access to information and ensuring the access of the NGOs and the mass media to the digitized database of income and personal interest statements, with automatic sorting and processing of data. It also recommended inventorying the overdue actions by eventually including the topical ones in the future open government action plan, ensuring the fulfillment by the central public authorities of the requirements concerning websites, preventing secretization of information of a public character in the documents issued by the local public authorities, ensuring the fulfillment by the state-run companies of the requirements concerning revealing of information and ensuring access to data from the Register of State Information Resources and Systems.
The report “Open Government in the Republic of Moldova: Topical Problems” was compiled in the framework of the project “Strengthening Rule of Law and Democracy: Contribution of Civil Society” that is supported by the Embassy of the Netherlands. The Republic of Moldova joined the Open Government Partnership in 2012, with four action plans being worked out and implemented so far.
