Description
Romania has the chance to have two wonderful regulations, useful for civil society representatives to involve themselves into decision making process. One of them is free access to public information law (L544/2001), known as FOIA law and the other one is public administration transparency in the decision making process law (L52/2003), known as Sun Shine law. During the time there are civil society representatives who are familiar and use FOIA for gathering public information, but most of them and also citizen do not know and do not use the Sun Shine law facilities, to get involved in the decision making processes. Consequently, public authorities apply this law very formal and NGOs make comments after the adoption of the regulation, when there are no many possibilities to improve it. The project intend is to enhance the responsibilities of civil society and public authorities regarding the implementation of Sun Shine law, the importance of public consultation in the process and to develop the monitoring capacity and their involvement in the decision making process, including also, the FOIA law.
Summary of project results
In Romania, citizens as well as NGOs lack the belief that they could interfere with public decision processes, in order to improve the decision making process. Also, their low level of understanding and implementing the principles of participatory democracy and their weak knowledge and skills that could help them improve public decisions in a transparent manner and using advocacy mechanism, were tackled by this project. Project objectives were to increase the responsibility of civil society and public authorities regarding the implementation of Law 52/2003, tackling the transparency of public decisions, to develop beneficiaries' watchdog capacity and to involve them, both citizens and NGOs, in decision-making processes. In the same time the project targeted to increase the internal advocacy capacity of Coalition 52, as an active network for future watchdog activities and advocacy campaigns. An online platform, “I decided to get involved”, was developed through the project. Active citizens and NGOs sent monthly requests for public information to public authorities, targeting to improve the Transparency of Public Decisions Law. The monthly answers from public authorities were processed in monthly reports and statistics and periodically made public by Coalition 52 members around the country. On one side were made visible the transparency or opacity of the public authorities, and, on the other side, the most active or passive regions regarding citizens and NGOs civic involvements. Several types of activities were carried out: promotional events, training sessions for applying civic instruments in relation with public authorities, assistance for beneficiaries in order to help them exercise their new skills. 4 advocacy campaigns were developed. One of the campaigns, concerning transparency of public decisions by public authorities, generated notable results, contributing with its reports to new national standards and methodologies regarding free access to public information and transparency of public authorities, adopted by the Romanian Government before the end of the project. Over 500 citizens and 500 NGOs around the country were involved in the project.
Summary of bilateral results