The report - Two Years in Government: Georgian Dream’s Performance Review was presented on May 28th at Tbilisi Marriot hotel. The report covers 20 different fields of public politics. 15 local NGOs prepared different chapters according to their specialization.

One of the chapters of the report “Open Governance” was prepared by IDFI, which actively observes and works in this field.

The report was sent to all public institutions before the presentation. Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Justice made comments on IDFI’s assessments. Organization’s responses was once more repeated on the presentation by the chairmen of the board Levan Avalishvili.

Ministry of Internal Affairs emphasized in its comments that the Ministry has become more accountable and transparent in last several years, on which IDFI replied with concrete numbers. In particular, in the period between October 2013 and December 2014, the organization sent 44 requests on public information to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, from which 27 requests were left with no answer. The public entities that are subordinated to the Ministry of Internal Affairs also distinguishes with non-transparency: Out of 105 public agencies there were only 6 cases when all the requests of IDFI were left without answer - from the mentioned 6 agencies, 4 of them were under the subordination of MIA.  

MIA ignored the letter sent on 13 January 2014. IDFI requested the information about the monthly bonuses and salary supplements of the officials and employees in 2014. Also, IDFI requested information about the number of cases in 2009-2014 on which the investigation had been launched on the facts of disclosure of secret of private conversation, disclosure of privacy of personal correspondence, telephone conversations, etc.

The institute appealed to administrative court and complained about inaction of MIA. However, Ministry had no reaction on the complaint, so the argument moved to the Tbilisi City Court. Based on all above mentioned cases, MIA holds one of the last positions in the ranking made within the frames of the project “Public Information Database – www.opendata.ge” According to the rating, MIA’s transparency index is only 26.8%

IDFI agreed to Ministry of Justice, which indicated that the organization had to highlight the fact that Georgia became a steering member of OGP in 2014.

The Ministry of Justice also noted, that the institute should have mentioned the regional conference of Open Government Partnership (3-4 June 2015) in its report. IDFI explained that since the report only involves the period between October 2012 and December 2014 the organization could not include the meeting of June 2015.

Another remark of the Ministry of Justice referred to draft law about freedom of information, which already has been preparing with active collaboration with civil sector. The Ministry noted that this fact was not mentioned in the IDFI’s part.

IDFI explained that the text of draft law, made by Fund Open Society Georgia, IDFI and experts, was sent to the Ministry of Justice several months ago. However the Ministry did not present it to Parliament and Government yet. Since the working process on draft law will be finished in the end of 2015, only after IDFI will make a comment about government actions in this scope.

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