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3. Introduction |
As an integral part of this project, titled “Accountability Through Transparency - Promoting the Right to Access Information in FR Yugoslavia and Romania" conducted in July-August 2001, a special activity was carried on, which we provisionally termed an experiment. Given the basic goal of the project - promoting the right to access public information - our departing point was the following premise: the way in which existing constitutional and legal provisions on access to public information are applied in practice by public institutions is taken as the measure of the degree to which the rights of citizens in this regard are fulfilled.
The basic objective of the experiment was to collect data about the way in which public institutions grant access to public information to various types of information users/category of requesters: individual citizens, representatives of domestic and imitational NGO’ s, private firms and the media (media firms and journalists). As planned, representatives of these diverse user categories submitted requests to various types of public institutions: federal and republic ministries, local authorities, and courts. We hoped in this way to obtain information on “openness" of public institutions, which we expected to vary depending on the category of requesters, type of information requested, type of public agency addressed and, it’s procedure for responding to such requests. Our intention was also to establish patterns in behavior of public administration officials, in providing citizens access to public information.
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