Twenty years after the Right of Access to Information law was adopted, the information has become ever harder to get, said one of the participants in a roundtable organised by Transparency International (TI BiH) organisation, Tuesday, marking the International Day for Universal Access to Information.

Presenting the Research on Monitoring of the implementation of the Law on the Right of Access of Information in BiH in the first nine months of 2021, the head of the TI Management Board Srdjan Blagovcanin said that 20 years on, there are still troubles regarding the right of access to information especially when dealing with possible cases of corruption or abuse of office.

The research found that the percentage of access to information was just above 50 percent, he added.

“That’s certainly a disappointing percentage especially knowing that the percentage is even lower when dealing with the judiciary,” Blagovcanin noted.

“The fact that it sometimes takes a lot of time and effort in the sense that you have to initiate administrative proceedings before the competent courts, and that in some situations it takes them up to two years to decide on such requests, actually puts citizens at a great disadvantage and makes access to information difficult,” Blagovcanin stressed.

Leila Bicakcic from the Centre for Investigative Journalism said it is increasingly difficult for journalists to get information.

“Instead of the implementation of the law improving the openness of institutions, it has led to institutions generally inventing various reasons within the legal solution to prevent access [to information] or make it as difficult as possible. Despite the 15-day legal deadline, there are many other ways to prolong it, so even if there is an intention of the institution to provide us with access to information, we used to wait for several months, and we’ve had cases where we waited for some information for six years,” she explained.

She concluded that it took the longest to receive information concerning financial operations, ie budget and budget execution, and information related to tenders and public contracts.