Active Bureaucracy

One hardly can find any logic in informational policies of governmental bodies. It is not laws but interpretations, comments, and subordinate legal acts that define why to open some information volume but to close or to restrict access to another data category or segment.

E-government is expected to free officials as well as citizens from excessive paperwork. But in Russia, a written request can be needed to get access even to official information already published in the Internet.

The official website of the Ministry for Justice publishes the federal register of normative acts of the Russian Federation subjects. However, there is no free access, for example, to expert conclusions of the Ministry of Justice or to data on prosecutors’ reactions to appeals concerning specific normative acts. Official consider the data in question as “additional information” that “does not attract sigificant public attention” and therefore may be not published for open access.
Meanwhile, according to the FOI Law, the citizen has right “not to substantiate the necessity of receiving the requested information on the activities of government bodies and bodies of local self-government, provided access to this information is not restricted” (Article 8, Paragraph 3).

That is why the IIFD applied to the Supreme Court demanding to cancel the Parapraph 8 of the “Procedure for Providing Information Contained by the Federal Register of Normative Legal Acts of the Russian Federation Subjects” approved by an order of the Ministry for Justice.

On June 30, the Court partially satisfied the IIFD’s claim and obliged to eliminate from the Procedure a provision requiring from citizens to motivate their requests for information.

Darya Nazarova, IIFD Senior Lawyer that represented our organization in the Court, says: “Officials of the defendant Ministry pointed that they have no technical possibilities to provide all citizens with information without written requests so that we should understand some restrictions. This sounds a bit childish today, when technical requirements obliging official websites to provide information without restrictions are already enforced; moreover, is it not one of the major functions of the Ministry for Justice to work with normative legal acts?”

The IIFD is preparing a cassation appeal, seeking for full satisfactions of its demands.