Armenian journalists ciritical of three-year-old FOI law
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The Freedom of Information
Law of Armenia adopted in 2003 is good, but its application is not good enough.
This opinion dominated
the “Freedom of Information” workshop in Tsaghkadzor on January 17-18 attended
by more than 35 media and NGO representatives.
“Armenia’s law on
freedom of information is very good in the sense that it states expressly what
sort of information is considered secret, what the order of providing or
rejecting to provide information is, who are considered those managing
information, etc. The same law in Bulgaria is very abstract from this point of
view,” Executive Director of Bulgaria’s Information Availability Program Gergana
Zhuleva said.
However, Freedom of
Information Center Director Shushan Doydoyan says that even after the adoption
of the law the protection of journalists’ right to get information has not
practically improved “mainly because a majority of journalists are either
unaware of the freedom of information law or simply do not apply it to protect
and realize their right to getting information.”
A majority of
journalists attending the workshop think that the right to freedom of
information is not applied not because of unawareness of the law, but because
provision of information mostly depends on arbitrariness and wishes of state
officials.