Electronic Request and Electronic Register, Despite Being Able To Facilitate Access To Information, Are Accepted With Difficulty by Public Institutions

The Parliamentary Commission on Legal Issues, Appointments and Immunity postponed at its meeting on October 19 voting on the report regarding the draft law on access to information, which was to be presented to the Parliament for voting in the second reading. Members of the commission and authors of the legislative initiative did not agree on certain amendments proposed after the first reading by the Government, parliamentary commissions, the Ministry of Justice, the National Anticorruption Center. Discussion will be resumed at another meeting.

Gheorghe Mocanu, unaffiliated MP, one of the authors of the legislative initiative, told Media Azi about the main disagreements at the Wednesday meeting of the commission. One of them refers to electronic requests. Instead of them, “the Ministry of Justice proposes harmonizing with the law on petitioning (requests to bear electronic signature). The main argument is the need to identify the person requesting information and the risk of spam (examples were given when hundreds of messages came to one email).” The authors of the legislative initiative did not accept this formula, so the members of the commission insisted on other ways to be found to identify applicants (possibly by using the model of other countries, where they successfully use electronic requests).

Another provision that caused disagreement referred to the electronic register. Here, according to Gheorghe Mocanu, MP, “a compromise might be to identify separately in one register petitions and requests for access to information, which are examined 30 and 15 days, accordingly (an identification code appears to every document introduced: petition, request for access to information, statement, request for opinion, Parliament directive, etc.).

Also, the Parliamentary Commission on Legal Issues, Appointments and Immunity discussed at its meeting the fines applied. In this regard, “it was agreed to increase the fine set it lei, but to reduce the fine set in conventional units (according to the new Code on Contraventions, which is to be voted in final reading, 1 c.u. = 50 lei).

According to the MP, media representatives should be invited to participate in the following meeting of the commission, in order to justify the need to adopt those provisions. “It would help officials understand the extent of the problem,” concluded Gheorghe Mocanu.

The authors of the draft law accept the discussions around this legislative initiative, but they believe that they cannot last forever and hope that the law will be adopted in reasonable time. “The law on access to information is important, but MPs and public authorities carry on discussions in order to find a better way to implement it. I hope that in this parliamentary session the project will be adopted in second reading, so as to make the work of a journalist, as well as citizens, more efficient, and so that information of public interest could be obtained without obstacles. Electronic requests would in this case be the best solution to obtaining information quickly and comfortably,” said lawyer Tatiana Puiu, one of the authors of the draft law, to Media Azi.

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