Although public administration should be transparent and open to the public, numerous institutions in BiH are not ready to share information or do so only partially. The survey, which has been conducted by the Coordinator for Public Administration Reform in BiH for years, has shown that they are particularly reluctant to publish financial data, including data on total allocations for appointed persons and civil servants. Some institutions have gone a step further, so not only do they not offer certain information, but they do not want to participate in filling out the questionnaire at all.
Public administration reform coordinator Dragan Ćuzulan in an interview for Focus talks about the results of the research in which 65 out of 80 invited institutions participated this year.
In the database of 80 state institutions
The institution that you are at the head of this year also conducted research on the transparency of public bodies. What are the results of the research and how many institutions participate in the research?
Ćuzulan: Let me just remind you that the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina, on the initiative of the Public Administration Reform Coordinator’s Office, adopted the Policy and Standards of Proactive Transparency in 2018, which include 38 types of information that institutions should proactively publish on their websites. It is about financial information, information about public procurement, public consultations, strategic documents, freedom of access to information and operational and organizational information. For research purposes, the Agency for Statistics of Bosnia and Herzegovina helped us develop an online system for measuring the transparency of institutions, and that institutions in the past period were obliged to appoint contact persons who would fill out the online questionnaire. There are 80 state institutions in the database, and 65 participated this year, which is slightly more than last year.
Why did not all institutions participate in the research? Who refuses to cooperate?
Ćuzulan: The Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina, by its conclusion from October last year, tasked all institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina to participate in the research and to implement the standards. I do not know the reasons why certain institutions did not participate in filling out the instructions. For example, the BiH Attorney General’s Office, which participated in the research for two years (2020 and 2021), informed us that this institution “is not an administrative body and that, as an institution that performs judicial activities, it is not subject to the norms stipulated in our activities.” On the other hand, judicial institutions such as the Prosecutor’s Office of BiH, the Court of BiH, the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council, and the Constitutional Court of BiH improve their transparency and openness towards citizens and in earlier periods appointed contact persons who participate in our research. The independence and independence of institutions should not be the reason why the public should be denied the publication of information that is not protected by law.
There is progress
Are there institutions that have never participated in research?
Ćuzulan: A small number of institutions: the Agency for the provision of services in air navigation – BHANSA, the State Regulatory Commission for Electricity of BiH, the Office for the Audit of Institutions of BiH.
Is there progress in the publication of data compared to an earlier period?
Ćuzulan: There is progress, perhaps it is not so visible to the public, but we see that the awareness of the need for a more open and accessible public administration is changing in the institutions. In the past, employee salaries were something that created resistance to publication, but today we have 24 institutions that have published this data. Six institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina have published all proactive transparency standards. In addition to the PARCO, the Directorate for European Integration, the Agency for Statistics of BiH and the Agency for the Development of Higher Education and Quality Assurance of BiH, there is also the Agency for Gender Equality of BiH and the Agency for Police Support of BiH.
Who hides data?
What information is the least published and what does that tell us? Specifically, which institutions are hiding this data?
Ćuzulan: Financial transparency continues to be a challenge because institutions publish annual financial plans irregularly, i.e. budgets. However, compared to research in previous years, the number of institutions that publish data on total expenditures for appointed persons, leading civil servants, civil servants and employees by position has increased. Although the institutions state that they have published this information, it is evident that the data of some of them are out of date or that the total income of the employees is given without past work and with a zero salary grade. We do not check the accuracy of the given data, and contact persons from BiH institutions are responsible for the same. Still 27 institutions do not have publicly available regulations on the internal organization and systematization of workplaces, and some of them do not even have organizational chart.
What about other levels of government? Do they also have an obligation to publish these 38 types of information?
Ćuzulan: The work of public administration is public and if we know that, then everyone has an obligation to publish data of public interest. In practice, this is not the case. Proactive transparency standards were not adopted by lower levels of government, although civil society carried out advocacy activities to make the standards mandatory. And the Strategic Framework for Public Administration Reform adopted by the BiH Government and the BiH Council of Ministers in the area of responsibility targets the issue of increasing the availability of information available to the public administration. The goal of the public administration reform implemented by BiH is to create an efficient, cost-effective and transparent public administration in accordance with the principles of the European administrative space and the fundamental elements of good administration.
Open data
Why is it important that the data stored by the administration is in open formats? What does this mean for citizens, business and the academic community?
Ćuzulan: Public institutions collect and produce a lot of data in order to perform their own tasks. In order for the potential of public data to be fully utilized, it is not enough only for the data to be published publicly, it is also important that they are published in a format that enables their processing and further use. Open data by its very definition means that anyone can freely use, reuse and redistribute, with a condition that the source of the data is acknowledged and shared under similar conditions. Their essential feature is that they do not contain personal data or other data protected by law. Examples of open data sets are: geolocation data, statistical data, public registers, meteorological data, environmental data. Many of the applications we use today via mobile devices were created thanks to the availability of data in open formats. Prijedor is the first local community to open its data at www.opendataprijedor.ba, and it is about 174 sets of data from different areas.
There are numerous arguments that justify the concept of opening public data: arguments related to transparency and availability of information, arguments that say that open public data can give citizens greater control over reforms in the public sector, arguments related to economic advantages. The European Data Portal in its 2020 study on the economic value of open data states that the size of the open data market is estimated at €184 billion, and is forecast to reach between €199.51 and €334.21 billion in 2025.
Recommendation of the European Commission
A meeting of the Special PAR Group for Public Administration Reform was recently held between Bosnia and Herzegovina and the European Commission. I believe that the European Commission is familiar with the new law on freedom of access to information in BiH, which was established by the Council of Ministers of BiH last month. Does the EC think this legislative framework is good, or does BiH have to change something in this segment again?
Ćuzulan: One of the recommendations of the European Commission for BiH from 2021 was that the legal provisions on access to information should be improved, which, among other things, includes the development of an extensive catalog of information that will be published on the websites of public institutions and ensure full implementation and regular and effective following these laws. In its report for 2022, the European Commission stated that the regulations on the right to access information are fragmented and do not comply with international and European standards. At the last session of the Special Group for Public Administration Reform, the European Commission informed that the Council of Ministers of BiH established a new law, that the provisions of Directive (EU) 2019/1024 of the European Parliament and the Council from 2019 on open data are taken and the reuse of public sector also. The novelty in the proposed law is the electronic submission of requests and the introduction of a completely new model of proactive publication of certain information important for the work, organization, decision-making and financing of BiH institutions. The draft law will still be in the parliamentary procedure and then we will see what the content of the law will be in the end considering the fact that representatives of the Ombudsman Institution, as well as civil society and the media community, were dissatisfied with the draft law.