Sandro Rochikashvili

On 14 December the Prime Minister of Georgia met the representatives of the Media Advocacy Coalition to discuss the current processes of the country and future plans.

The Coalition, which was an active participant in the development of Georgia’s action plan for Open Government Partnership, includes 12 NGOs (including IDFI). The goal of the Coalition is strengthening the role of media and protecting the interests of media owners and journalists.  

One of the topics discussed on the meeting was the Open Government Partnership. The Coalition expressed the desire that the supervision of the projects and similar activities within the frameworks of the OGP initiative be transferred to Bidzina Ivanishvili. The members of the Coalition expressed their readiness to actively collaborate with the Prime Minister and provide him with ideas for improving the level of transparency and freedom of information and media.

Meeting the action plan of Georgia for OGP and events held within its framework are currently under the supervision of the Analytic Department of the Ministry of Justice, which held a contest between the students of Georgia in the framework of the International Anti-Corruption Day with the purpose of popularizing Open Government Partnership (See the previous blog-post).

At the same time, in the frameworks of the USAID Good Governance in Georgia Project (G3), a civil society forum was held in Bazaleti in the same week, on 14-16 December. The topics of the forum were the issues of freedom of information in Georgia. The representatives of IDFI, Giorgi Kldiashvili and Levan Avalishvili talked about the action plan of Georgia for OGP. Representatives of different non-governmental organizations and media, as well as independent experts, participated in the forum, where they presented their own views about the freedom of information legislation and the improvement of the practices in Georgia.