Starting from 1 March 2017, learning best practices of access to public information became easier since a new online course “Access to public information: from A to Z” was launched. The course was developed with the support of the Council of Europe Project “Strengthening Freedom of Media and Establishing a Public Broadcasting System in Ukraine” and in the cooperation with the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights and CSO “Center for Democracy and Rule of Law” (CEDEM). The course is in open access at the web-platform Prometheus, and everyone interested can sign up and complete it within 5 weeks.

At the press conference held on 1 March, Mårten Ehnberg, Head of the Council of Europe Office in Ukraine noted: “The course will help each citizen, regardless of his or her status, position, income, to open the doors of the Ukrainian state institutions and other state actors and to receive information on their activities that influence his or her life”.

Valeriya Lutkovska, Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights spoke about problems in the sphere of access to public information that preceded creation of the course: “In October 2014 we received the authority to implement and control the implementation of the Law of Ukraine “On Access to Public Information”. Since then we have been facing not only the non-acceptance of the Law by the state officials, but also lack of understanding of its content by both state officials  and civil society activists and citizens. This led to situations when requesters drafted their inquiries for public information in the wrong way. Thus, the course will be of interest to civil society activists, journalists, state officials and law students”.

Tetyana Oleksiyuk, Deputy Director, lawyer of CSO “Center for Democracy and Rule of Law” and one of the trainers of the course spoke about the challenges that the course authors had faced: “The range of the course audience is broad. The course was designed for both civil society activists and state officials. Our aim was to create the course in a way that it would become a daily tool for these two groups. Therefore, we had to look for the touch points that would lead to state officials being more open when it came to granting access to public information and citizens – more competent when requesting it”. Other trainers of the course are Vita Volodovska and Igor Rozkladaj, CEDEM experts. Iryna Kushhir, Representative of the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, Head of the Department for Drafting of Constitutional Appeals and Observance of the Right to Access to Public Information and Nataša Pirc Musar, Council of Europe expert (Slovenia) prepared introductory video-lectures to the course.

The aim of the course is to raise the awareness of the citizens on their right to access the public information and in particular - to provide support to public officials so that they fully comply with the legal requirements of the Law and do not violate it.

This course will be useful to those who perform their duties and prepare responses to the requests for public information since it explains the procedure for providing responses to such requests and helps with resolving more sophisticated issues – for instance, how to keep the the balance between the right to personal data protection and the right to access public information.

Thanks to the course materials the course participants will learn how and to whom they should address their requests for public information and in what cases the administrator of the information has the right to reject the request.

According to Ivan Prymachenko, cofounder of the Prometheus open online video-courses platform, more than 2 000 persons have already registered for the course and till the end of the year this number can reach 10 000.

We invite you to register for the online course “Access to public information: from A to Z” using the following link: https://goo.gl/tXgAOp.

The recording of the press conference is available at: https://youtu.be/vXVHWekSTBg.

Council of Europe Project “Strengthening Freedom of the Media and Establishing a Public Broadcasting System in Ukraine” is aimed to enhance the role of media and the public broadcaster in particular as an instrument for consensus building in the Ukrainian society. The Project is implemented in the framework of the Council of Europe Action Plan for Ukraine 2015-2017. In 2016-2017 the Project is financed from the budget of the Council of Europe Action Plan for Ukraine 2015-2017.

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To find more information visit the web-site of the Council of Europe office in Ukraine: