On April 7, Ministry of Justice of Georgia hosted the fourth forum of Open Government Partnership. The meeting was attended by the representatives of NGOs and public institutions.

During the first part of the meeting, participants discussed the commitments described in the action plan and their compliance with OGP objectives. Currently more than 20 commitments are already defined in the action plan; various public institutions take obligation to meet these commitments with the help of the partner institutions. The commitments are designed in a way to improve four major directions: public service, increase of public participation, improved management of public resources and creating safe environment. It must be noted that the draft of the action plan commitments are not complete as not all the institutions have provided the list of their ideas and commitments.

Georgia, as part of the OGP initiative is obliged to elaborate the first draft of the 2014-2015 action plan by April 30, 2014. The final version of the action plan will be presented on June 15, 2014.

The second part of the meeting was dedicated to discussing the process of public consultations. The consultations commenced on March 15 from Kakheti and it has covered the majority of the regions of Georgia with more than 500 persons. 14 meetings were conducted. The forum summarized the results of the consultations. It turned out that the biggest problems in the regions are unemployment and nepotism, expensive fees of services and only online availability of number of services, since internet is not accessible for the majority of the regional population. Besides, representative of the Ministry of Justice introduced the attendants with the interesting ideas and suggestions from the participants of the regional public consultations. The public consultations will end on April 15 after which all the summarizing documents of each consultation will be published on the web-page of the Ministry of Justice of Georgia.

The third part of the meeting was dedicated to the presentation of the new member of the forum – ‘Partnership for Road Safety’. Director of the organization Irakli Izoria talked about the mission of the organization, current and completed projects and the compliance of their work with the aims of OGP.

The next meeting of the forum will take place on May 7.