They also state that public institutions would be exempted of postal and printing expenses.
‘The platform will save time, effort and logistical resources for both parties involved in the process,’ said Lilia Ionita, the project coordinator at the Center for Analysis and Prevention of Corruption.
The platform contains a list of public institutions, from which citizens can select the authority they want to address the request to. The institution receiving the request will respond the same way. Concurrently, persons wishing to submit a request to a public institution will have the possibility to check whether their question has already been answered previously by that institution.
‘ Because requests are public, we believe that institutions will be responsible to answer fully and in due dates stipulated by the law,’ says Stela Pavlov, the project director at the Association ‘Lawyers for Human Rights’.
This platform was created within the project ‘Respect of the right to public information through strategic litigation and by way of creating an open-source platform for making public freedom of information requests to public bodies’, with the financial support of Freedom House, a partner of Internews in implementing the multi-year project funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), ‘Media Enabling Democracy, Inclusion, and Accountability in Moldova’ (MEDIA-M).