On February 14 and 15, 2002 in "Adacta" hall of Hotel, Rila Access to Information Programme organized "Training workshop - training for the administration on the application of Access to public information act (APIA)." Participants in the workshop were 75 representatives from central administration as well as officers from local administration in the towns of Kustendil, Blagoevgrad and Pernik.

This training for public officers from central administration aimed to create a better understanding in the implementation period of APIA and to present the international experience in this particular area. The training built capacity, skills and knowledge in the administration how to implement and enforce the APIA. International participants in the training were FOI experts Sara Buchanan (Article 19), Ivan Szekely (Open Society Archives, Central European University), Lucas Clarke (Ireland FOI Network coordinator), and Keith Thomas (ABA CEELI).

Gergana Jouleva, AIP Executive Director, introduced and welcomed participants of the training while Sara Buchanan presented the activities of Article 19, the leading organization of the project "Practical access to Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe" financially supported by European Commission within which the training was organized. 9 partnering NGOs from 5 countries participate in this project focusing on defamation laws and freedom of information legislation in the respective countries.

Ivan Szekely and Lucas Clarke presented respectively the Hungarian and Australian/Ireland legislation on freedom of information and for American FOIA spoke Keith Thomas.

Bulgarian Freedom of Information Act was presented by AIP lawyer Alexander Kashumov.

Gergana Jouleva, AIP presented the results from the survey "Fulfillment of the obligations under APIA by the bodies of the Executive Power" conducted at the end of 2001. She outlined the main conclusions from the survey and explained the proposed suggestion from the interviewed officers for improving the application of APIA.

Fany Davidova, AIP presented the existing attitudes toward seeking and providing information. She discussed the collected refusals of information for 2001 in AIP database.

After the theoretical part of the training participants shared their knowledge and accumulated experience on APIA implementation. The participants' opinion was that they didn't receive any training so far and that they needed training on APIA and on Personal Data Protection Act. In the discussion the participants from the administration shared their problems with the application of these two laws as well as the problems - how to register request under APIA, problematic cases with the exemptions from the APIA, state and official (office) secret and so on.

The 14 day limit within which the administration has to give answer to the request of information was an issue. According to the representatives from the administration the existing time limit is too short when the request concerns a big number of documents, especially when some of them contain third party information or they have to provide partial access to the information.

AIP team presented the court appeals under APIA in cases of refusal of information conducted by AIP lawyer Alexander Kashumov.

The training workshop was closed by Gergana Jouleva, Executive director of AIP.