Fifth OGP Forum Meeting at the Ministry of Justice of Georgia
On
April 29 Ministry of Justice of Georgia hosted the fifth OGP forum meeting.
Forumaimed at discussing the draft version of the OGP Action Plan which will be
presented to the Steering Committee of Open Government Partnership on April 30,
while the final version must be submitted by June 15. The meeting, attended by
the representatives of the public institutions and civil society, discussed the
relevance of the taken commitments with the aims and challenges of OGP; in the
end of the meeting, the representatives of NGOs made the attendants familiar
with their recommendations.
Rapporteur of the Open Government Georgia Forum, head of the
Analytical Department of Ministry of Justice, Rusudan Mikhelidze talked about
the OGPregional meeting in Dublin,
which will take place on May 8-9. OGP member states will present the draft
action plans. Georgia will be represented by the Ministry of Justice and the
representatives of the civil society.
Rusudan
Mikhelidze also concerned the issue of OGP Award, which is granted to the
innovative project, complying with the objectives of OGP. The representative of
OSGF, Vako Natsvlishvili proposed nominating the memorandum signed between the
Parliament of Georgia and the civil society organizations in December 2013;
this memorandum aims at creating the concept for the relations between the
state and public bodies.
The
forum participants also talked about the elections of OGP Steering Committee
and the chances of Georgia on these elections. As it was noted, this will be
the first case of electing the members of the committee and considering the
Georgian achievements in terms of OGP commitments, our country has chance to
become the member of the committee.
The
second part of the meeting was dedicated to discussing the commitments defined
in the 2014-2015 draft action plan. The commitments cover four challenges:
public service, increase of public participation, improved management of public
resources and creating safe environment.
Participants
discussed each commitment, their relevance to the OGP challenges and as a
result, several commitments were taken out of the list, some of them were moved
to other category. The draft version of the action plan will be discussed on
the national and later, on the international level, which will be followed by
further remarks and recommendations about certain issues. Forum also discussed
the criteria of defining the risks as well as talked about the indicators of
success of the commitments.
The
meeting was finished by introducing the recommendations of the NGOs, which
consist of four parts. First one encourages the parliament to introduce the
citizen petition platform. This recommendation was grounded by the experience
of European countries. Second recommendation aims at involving the citizens in
the law-making process through enabling them to comment on the draft laws.
According to the third recommendation, Ministry of Internal Affairs must
provide the access to the crime map and the information about the road safety
and the incidents. As for the last recommendation, according to it, legislation
on surveillance must be improved since the practice of surveillance still
remain to be one of the most problematic issues.
Forum
meetings will be intensively conducted until June 15, in order to ensure to
submit the improved version of the action plan.