"As part of the Ombudsman Plus platform, a 6-month monitoring of the compliance with the Law "On Access to Public Information" was conducted in all regions of Ukraine," noted Iryna Kyshnir, representative of the Ombudsperson for the observance of the right to access public information.

The monitors visited around 40 sessions of different City Councils and Oblast State Administrations, submitted more than 700 requests for public information, and examined work operations at the places, specially created for enquirers by the information holders to work with the requested documents.

There were four so-called tides of the monitoring, focusing on access to work operations of the information holders and special places to work with the provided information, to data on financial resources, to court hearings and draft acts of information holders, and, last but not least, the completeness and timeliness of the answers to the requests.

"The third tide was the most challenging part of the initiative and the longest in terms of time allotted," concluded Tetyana Oleksiyuk, Project Coordinator at the Centre for Democracy and Rule of Law.

"While working on this initiative, we tried to get the best of both sides. On the one hand, we discovered the most burning issues in the sphere of access to public information and, on the other hand, we provided practical recommendations for the information holders," stated Taras Shevchenko, Head of the Centre. "Hopefully, our findings and input will help improve the situation regarding access to public information in general and make our government officials more open and forward-going."

Access to information monitoring is supported by the Strengthening Capacities of the Ombudsperson's Office Project, implemented by UNDP and funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark.