“World for All” Against the
Double Standard of the Administration

How the civil association has made it through the “silent refusal” labyrinth of the Municipality of Silistra

Yordan Georgiev

A silent refusal on an access to information request by the administration of the Mayor Ivo Andonov is the reason for the “meeting at the magistrates.”

“World for All” challenged a refusal for provision of access to public information in the Administrative Court – Silistra. Initially, Georgi Milkov, a chairperson of the Center of NGOs in Razgrad, a partner organization of the Association “World for All,” shares experience of how to litigate under the Access to Public Information Act (APIA) and later Kiril Terziiski, attorney in the legal team of Access to Information Programme (AIP), wrote the complaint to be filed in the court. Administrative court – Silistra upheld the right of complete access to the requested information and repealed the silent refusal of the mayor, obligating the Municipality of Silistra to “issue an explicit decision in writing on the request.”

Three transportation companies in Silistra are interested in the requested public information as they have found out that other transportation companies receive payments from the municipality on time at even larger amounts while the attitude towards them is completely different in spite of the small amounts, sometimes 100 times smaller, i.e. “50 BGN against 5,000 BGN.”

Te double standard applied by the public administration and the lack of evidence in the situation triggered the filing of the access to information request. The requested information is about “the payments made by the Municipality of Silistra to transportation companies in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010” under the purviews of two regulations and a law – Regulation No. 2 of the Ministry of Finance for terms and conditions for providing funds to compensate for the reduced revenue from the application of prices for travel on road transport as provided in regulations for certain categories of passengers; Regulation No. 3 of April 4, 2005 on terms and conditions for providing funds to subsidize the transport of passengers on unprofitable bus routes in urban transport and transport in mountainous and other areas; and under the Law on Education for organizing specialized transportation for students under 16 years of age and for teachers on grounds of signed contracts, presented in the Ministry of Finance, under which the transport companies are compensated at prices per kilometer, determined by a Decree of the Council of Ministers.

“The court decision in our favour was delivered on Nove,ber 8, 2010. The Municipality of Silistra has not executed the court decision yet and most probably they will not execute it,” commented the Chairperson of the association Irena Marinova.

“The requested information is public and there is overriding public interest in its disclosure as it is related to the public life in the Republic of Bulgaria and allows citizens to form their own opinion on the activities of the body obliged under the APIA – the Municipality of Silistra, the lawyers involved in the case say. That is why it is not necessary that the consent of the beneficiaries of the municipal budget is sought – no matter they are individuals or legal entities. This attitude aims at revealing corruption and abuse of power, increasing transparency and accountability of the obliged bodies under Art. 3 of the APIA and in relation to Art. 107, Para. 4 of the Administrative Procedure Code. The documents are of high public importance regarding the local community and are related to information about the government of the Municipality of Silistra, which is certified under ISO 9000 as a municipality following international standards for transparent government.

November 2010

This case is part of the book "Civil Participation and Access to Information (15 Years of the APIA, 37 stories of NGOs)" published by AIP within the implementation of the project “Enhancing the Capacity of Nongovernmental Organizations to Seek Public Information” supported with a grant under the NGO Programme in Bulgaria under the Financial Mechanism of the European Economic Area 2009 – 2014 (www.ngogrants.bg).

The whole responsibility for the content shall be taken by the Access to Information Programme Foundaiton and it cannot be assumed under any circumstances that the document reflects the official stance of the  Financial Mechanism of the European Economic Area and the Operator of the Programme for NGO support in Bulgaria.