The present publication concerns the Law on Freedom of Information, the adoption of which was supposed to fill the gaps in the legislation of public administration and increase the standards of accountability and transparency. The Government of Georgia was to submit the relevant draft law to the Parliament as early as 2015, although this commitment, which was taken in the framework of the Association Agreement with the European Union, remains to be fulfilled, - reads the reports released by International Transparency Georgis.
According to the report, systems of public administration of any country need to be regularly renewed and reformed so that the state will keep pace with the political, economic, social, or technological changes that are underway in the world. Georgia is no exception in this regard, and during decades the country has undergone several stages of public administration reform. In this process, the platforms of the country’s integration and cooperation with Europe have played an important role, in the framework of which the Georgian authorities have committed to implement several needed reforms. In this respect, a particular role is played by the Georgia-EU Association Agreement signed in 2014 and the association agendas and national annual action plans that derive from it. However, it should be noted that several commitments have been accumulated during the years which were taken by the authorities and are yet to be fulfilled.
"The need to subject freedom of information to clear regulation has existed in Georgia for many years. Currently, the norms regulating public information are scattered across several articles of the General Administrative Code and their content also fails to meet contemporary challenges: the scope of application of the norms are vague, the concept of public information has not been sufficiently defined, there is no independent and effective mechanism for the supervision on violations, etc", - reads the document.
