By Decision No 7719/10.12.2015 (in Bulgarian) as of 10 December 2015, the Administrative Court Sofia - City (ACSC) repealed the refusal of the Sofia Municipality administrative secretary to provide access to the mayor’s order regarding the organization and control over the record management and the implementation of the administrative tasks within the municipality.
The information was requested by the citizen Ivan Petrov.
The refusal was grounded on the argument that the request did not comply with the requirements of the APIA, but is a pretence for the provision of a document. The court upheld that the Sofia Municipality chief secretary had wrongly assumed that the APIA did not provide for requesting access to documents. It is irrelevant to the obligation for provision if the request was for a specific material carrier of information or was a description of the information. The material carrier of information – the mayor’s order in the current case – is not something that is requested for its material, but for the information that it contains. This means that the access to the public information is equal to the obtaining of the document that contains that information.
The decision is subject to appeal.