On January 25, 2019, the Access to Information Programme (AIP) presented certificates to the students from professional program “Public Communications and Information Sciences” at the New Bulgarian University for successfully passing the practical course “Access to Information Public Communications.” The AIP delivers the course for a third year, encompassing the period November 2018 – January 2019.

 

AIP Executive Director Dr Gergana Jouleva, and the lawyers from the AIP legal team Alexander Kashumov, Kiril Terziiski, and Stephan Anguelov were the course lecturers. The syllabus included access to information standards and legislation, as well as specific examples of the Access to Public Information Act use, especially for journalistic investigations.

 

As a practical assignment, the students prepared access to information requests on a diversity of topics and sent them by e-mail to different institutions. The AIP lawyers assisted the formulation of the requests and the identifying of the responsible institutions. Requests were sent to the Ministry of Education and Science, the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Transport, Information Technologies, and Communications, The Financial Supervision Commission, Bulgarian Agency for Food Safety, the Regional Inspectorate of Environment and Water – Sofia and the RIEW – Pernik, Sofia Directorate of Internal Affairs, and to the mayors of Vitosha Region (Sofia) and the Sofia Municipality.

 

The course is held in partnership with the Mass Communications Department of the New Bulgarian University and is within the project Transparency Advice Center supported by the America for Bulgaria Foundation.