Public Documents Access Week

The Information and Privacy Agency organizes a roundtable discussion with the Heads and General Secretaries of Ministries and Regulatory Agencies.

In the opening of the roundtable, the Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ms. Krenare Sogojeva-Dërmaku, emphasized that the Agency, through its legal mandate for overseeing the implementation of the Law on Access to Public Documents, will continue its efforts to serve as a promotional and awareness-raising body, ensuring the realization of the right to information, a right guaranteed by law, the Constitution, and protected by international conventions.

The Commissioner highlighted that with the increasing number of complaints, strengthening transparency through other mechanisms is both necessary and essential. For this year, the Agency has launched the Transparency Program, which aims to enhance the proactive publication of public documents by institutions, a factor that would directly increase institutional accountability. This mechanism, she noted, will serve to reduce bureaucratic requests for access to public documents by raising the level of accountability and transparency to a higher level of communication with interested stakeholders.

As in previous meetings, Commissioner Krenare Sogojeva-Dërmaku reiterated the request to the General Secretaries of institutions that, during the handling of complaints, they are obliged to conduct the harm test. This test assesses the potential harm to the protected interest against the public interest for disclosure, before deciding to refuse the proactive publication of public documents, as well as before making a decision to deny requests for access to public documents.

Comparative reports on the complaints submitted to the IPA and the monitoring of proactive publication were presented by the Agency’s Director General, Ms. Lumnije Demi, and the Head of the Complaints Division, Ms. Arbëri Hiseni.

Regarding the importance of transparency and proactive publication of public documents, remarks were also made by Mr. Arben Krasniqi, Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Office, Ms. Megan McCormack, Head of the Governance Division in the Democratization Department at OSCE, and Ms. Jeta Xharra, Director of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN).