The Committee on Culture, Science, Education and Media and the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe held a joint hearing on Wednesday 24 June “Transparency and Accountability in the Public Administration –the Tromsø Convention”. The event showcased the added value of the Tromsø Convention as the first binding international instrument guaranteeing a general stand-alone right of access to official documents. It highlighted the positive impact that wider participation in the Convention would have on transparency and good governance across Council of Europe Member States as well as on international cooperation.

The event heard from two experts on access to information:

• Tetyana Oleksiyuk – Vice-President of the Council of Europe Access Info Group (AIG), Tromsø Convention; and
• Carlos Cordero Sanz - Co-founder and President of Access Info Europe, Director of Sustentia-Innovación Social

Ms Oleksiyuk emphasised that “Political disruption across Europe comes with risks of eroding democratic standards established by national legislation. Ratifying the Tromsø Convention can help ensure that these standards are upheld at a national and international level”. The existence of robust domestic freedom of information laws should not be a barrier to ratifying the Convention but a reason for doing so because of the low administrative burden required to comply with its standards while benefiting from peer-learning and international cooperation. The Tromsø Convention does not require full compliance of national legislation with it before ratification. The conclusions and recommendations of its monitoring mechanism are helping the member States which are Parties to the Convention to reach such compliance. 

Mr Cordero Sanz set out the findings of an analysis carried out by Access Info Europe of access to information laws across 15 European countries. The ratification of the Tromsø Convention often correlates with better access to information frameworks across participating Member States. Newer legislative frameworks seem to be inspired by the Tromsø Convention’s standards and perform better than their older counterparts. The Tromsø Convention has inspired stronger freedom of information laws in some countries which have not signed or ratified it.

The experts then took questions and observations from members of the Parliamentary Assembly including on how issues of citizen participation and access to justice are dealt with by the Tromsø Convention, on access to historical documents, on digitalisation of documents, and concerning intellectual property in relation to the right of access.