Current practice in North Macedonia does not bode well.
Under North Macedonia’s Law on Access to Public Information law, journalists or members of the public can request access to information that is not publicly available by submitting a formal request to the institution in question, which has 20 days to respond. But this right is also being eroded.
The state-funded Agency for Access to Public Information, which is tasked with making sure public bodies uphold rules on free access to public information, said that so far this year – up to late September – it had received exactly 500 complaints that institutions had not responded. That compares with 354 complaints for the whole of 2024, the year that the current ruling party, the right-wing VMRO-DPMNE, took office.
“We still have over three months left in the year, so the number will rise,” said the agency’s director, Plamenka Bojcheva.
BIRN’s own experience reflects this trend.
This year, responding to a request from BIRN, the public enterprise Railways Infrastructure refused to release a feasibility study on the current government’s plan to introduce commuter trains in the capital, Skopje, saying there was “no public interest” in its release. Even after the Agency for Access to Public Information ordered it to do so, the document remains under wraps.
The Ministry of Health has not responded for over six months to BIRN questions regarding the company awarded a contract for sterilisation in state-run health clinics.
In another case this year, the State Audit Office rejected a BIRN request for the names of the auditors who worked on political party reports, citing security concerns, only to later say it does not know which auditors conducted the work.
The Anti-Corruption Commission refused access to archived documents related to the English language certificate of Bojan Hristovski, head of the National Security Agency, citing personal data protection rules; when the Agency for Access to Public Information overruled, the Anti-Corruption Commission sued the agency. Only after six months of appeals and a court ruling was the document released.
Bojcheva said her agency’s hands are often tied.
“They don’t act on our rulings, and we have no enforcement tools, except to initiate minor offence procedures against officials,” she told BIRN.
“In a recent case, the staff proved they did everything in their power to provide the requested information but weren’t supported by the leadership.”
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