Ro
En
Рy
Project Coordinator from the Council of Europe, Dumitru Lazur, presented the conceptual amendments to the Law on Access to Information. He specified that the group members came with the proposals to replace the notion of ‘official information’ with the notion of ‘information of public interest’, which would include a wider range of information, requested by journalists and citizens. Thus, the information of public interest will mean any information and/or content regardless of its medium (on paper, electronic or any other format), including personal data of public interest that concern activities or result from activities of information providers.
The members of the working group also suggested to expand the list of providers of information of public interest. According to them, the following entities should be obliged to provide such information: central and local public authorities, including autonomous authorities, enterprises, public institutions, self-management bodies, colleges, councils or any other bodies, exercising public power or providing public services or interferes with public money, organizations founded by the state or in which the state holds a share, or where the Government’s representative is a member of the boards of directors, individuals or legal entities, of public law or remunerated from public money or international funds/grants.
This list will include enterprises and joint-stock companies in which the State is founder and/or shareholder, political parties, social-political organizations, political groups, non-profit organisations, private individuals and legal entities and non-profit organisations that are and/or were in partnership and/or cooperation with the subjects listed above and are in possession of public interest information.
According to Dumitru Lazur, the expansion of the list of information providers is welcomed as journalists have often faced the limitation of access to information from entities such as SA Moldtelecom which used to motivate their refusal by the fact that the law does not oblige joint stock companies to provide such information.
The members of the working group also advocated for making information providers legally bound to publish more new data on the websites they manage, such as: number of employees, data on the management of the institution, including studies of these persons, professional activity, the way of accession of managers and heads of subdivisions; data on financial sources, budget and balance sheet of the institution, official statistics and basic indicators of the institution’s field of activity and others.
One of the working group’s independent experts Sergiu Bozianu mentioned that there were cases when the information providers misinterpreted the Law on Personal Data Protection, refusing to provide data on the number of employees or the salaries of the heads, despite being obliged to submit information on income to specialized institutions. The expert proposed to introduce a new notion in the Law on Personal Data Protection – ‘personal data of public interest’, defined as personal data related to the declaration of assets and personal interests, professional education, the way of fulfilling tasks and duties, property or public money management, acts of public interest in which a person carrying out public functions was involved.
