On March 18, 2016 in Sofia, Access to Information Programme (AIP) held the annual meeting with the journalists of its country-wide coordinators' network.

 

AIP Executive Director Gergana Jouleva presented key achievements from AIP advocacy activities in 2015. The 2016 goals and challenges before AIP and the coordinators' network were outlined.

 

The Head of AIP legal team Alexander Kashumov presented the 2015 amendments to the Access to Public Information Act and the AIP participation in the public debate and the discussions held at different responsible institutions, as well as the AIP statements on the Draft Public Procurements Act and the Draft Anti-corruption Act.

 

Darina Palova from the AIP legal team presented statistics and characteristics of the cases referred to AIP for legal help and consultation during 2014. Kiril Terziiski presented an overview of ATI litigation.

 

Diana Bancheva, AIP communications coordinator, presented statistics of the AIP web sites traffic and the updated specialized web site Access to Information and Journalistic Investigations.

Stephan Anguelov from the AIP legal team, who is the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) researcher for Bulgaria, presented findings and conclusions from the 2014-2015 IRM progress report on the implementation of the second national action plan within the Open Government Partnership initiative (OGP).

Based on a number of interviews, the AIP coordinators, all of them journalists in the regional cities of Bulgaria, outlined the readiness of the local and regional public bodies to implement the new obligations for proactive publication of information introduced with the 2015 APIA amendments. A summary of the results of their interviews is published in the AIP monthly newsletter for March 2016 (in Bulgarian).

 

AIP presented the Coordinator of the Year award to Zdravka Maslyankova, AIP coordinator in Veliko Tarnovo.  Interview with Maslyankova is also published in the AIP monthly FOI Newsletter for March 2016 (in Bulgarian).

The annual meeting was held within the project Civil Center for Support of Transparency in Public Life supported by a grant from the America for Bulgaria Foundation.