Citizens have to wait more than a month for a response from public institutions

Banja Luka, September 28, 2011. – September 28, as the International Right to Know Day is celebrated all over the world. The right of access to information is regarded as one the fundamental human rights in all democratic countries and is guaranteed to all relevant international documents that provide basic human rights. There are three acts of Freedom of access to information in Bosnia and Herzegovina that have become effective (FOIA) at the state and entity level of authority. However, their implementation, although improved in comparison to the previous years, still hasn’t met international standards of transparency.

Namely, as every year, on the occasion of the International Right to Know Day, Transparency International Bosnia and Herzegovina has carried out an analysis of the implementation of the law that should guarantee this right to citizens. For this purpose, TI BiH has sent 300 official letters to public institutions in BiH, at the state, entity, cantonal and municipal level in order to determine the percentage and quality of responses received. Although the percentage of the responses received has increased, only half of the responses (53%) have come within the statutory deadline of 15 days, while others have come after the repeated urgency. In this way, an average waiting time for a response from institutions takes a month, what is twice more than regulated by the statutory deadline within which institutions are obliged to provide citizens with information.

On the other hand, institutions do not serve responses in the form of arrangements, which they are also obliged to do under the law, so, only 15% of the responses are submitted in this form. This is particularly worrying when bearing in mind that citizens in this way are deprived of the opportunity to appeal to undelivered or incomplete information. At the same time, citizens are impossible to pursue, by administrative or judicial proceedings of public authorities, to claim the right of information that has been regulated by the law.

It is necessary to mention the fact that nearly a third of the responses (30%) that were submitted to institutions by TI BiH were incomplete. This comes to be an additional problem in the implementation of the Freedom of access to information act, which is being in this way respected at first, but deftly avoided in general.

All the data above mentioned lead to the conclusion that we can not talk about a successful and effective implementation of these laws, although it has been ten years since the adoption of the Freedom of access to information act, and despite a visible progress compared to earlier years when TI BiH was conducting similar researches.

For this reason, TI BiH has launched an initiative for the harmonization of the legal framework regulating this area, primarily through imposing sanctions in entity laws on institutions that break the law, which would be in compliance with the law at the state level. TI BiH hopes that legislators will adopt the proposed changes and support this initiative, and at the same time appealing to institutions not to wait for the imposing sanctions, but to recognize their obligation and thoroughly apply the law, bearing in mind that the information held by public authorities represent public goods, which citizens have the right to obtain and a duty of institutions is to make them available.