Non-government organisation Access to Information Programme Foundation (AIPF) called for the immediate withdrawal of proposed amendments to the Access to Public Information Act on March 14.

The act was adopted in 2000 with the stated intent of making it possible for the public to have easy and free of charge access to public information.

The bill, submitted to Parliament on February 28 2007, envisages a longer time for handling applications requesting to use information. At the moment, the period is 14 days, but this could change to 20 if the bill is adopted. Furthermore, information would be provided at a tariff, which will be decided on by the Cabinet. Currently, the only expenses that an applicant pays are for material costs such as paper. Moreover, the bill envisages scrapping the right to access to partial information. At present, citizens are allowed to access documents containing state secrets or personal data, provided that an administration clerk "blurs" the parts containing the protected information.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the bill is the introduction of the term "interested persons", meaning that the public would now have to prove their interest in the required information, while the 2000 act does not require this. This condition might prove all too arbitrary. A lack of set rules as to how exactly proving would be done could mean that decisions would be made on an individual basis depending on the personal interpretation of the administration clerk.

According to Alexander Kashumov, head of the foundation's legal department, the way in which the bill was submitted was very disturbing. According to the law, a bill should first go for discussion to the Cabinet and then be tabled for debate and voting in Parliament, a procedure seemingly too protracted for the Agency for Information Technology.

AIPF head Gergana Zhouleva said that the bill's sponsors had taken a shortcut by finding three MPs to take the draft bill directly to Parliament. There was no consultation with specialists working on information issues, she said. AIPF found out about the draft bill two days after it had been submitted to Parliament. They found only because the State Administration Ministry called AIPF to ask for its position. In fact, the bill was sent to Parliament without even the State Administration Ministry, the state body responsible for following whether the 2000 act is implemented, having been consulted.

The three MPs said that the bill was justified on the basis of the directive on access to information from the public sector adopted by the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. There was a lack of clarity about the relationship between the terms "public information" (in the 2000 act) and "information from the public sector" (in the directive). At the same time, the two terms seemed to be regarded as interchangeable by the draft bill.

Despite the existence of the directive, no country in the European Union has adopted its norms in legislation on access to public information. Currently, the AIPF says, this directive could be applied only in the three EU countries that do not have an access to information law - Malta, Luxembourg and Cyprus.

Kashumov underlined that the directive was only a minimum standard for access to information and did not go as far as the Bulgarian Act for Access to Public Information adopted in 2000. He said that someone was trying to bring something totally unnecessary into Bulgarian legislation. "If anything needs changing, it is to improve public access to information online," Kashumov told the news conference. "They must improve the quality of the law, not ruin it," he said.

The Institute for Market Economy (IME) also called for withdrawal of the draft bill. IME executive director Svetla Kostadinova said that any legislative initiative should be accompanied by a cost benefit analysis. But no such analysis had been done of the proposed amendments, and adopting them would mean serious spending, she said.

Kostadinova said that rough calculations by the IME showed that if the fees for receiving information were increased, the cost of access to information could rise by about 60 000 leva. Extending the time-scale for acquiring of information from 14 to 20 days would increase the cost to companies waiting for information by about 70 000 to 80 000 leva.

The proposed amendments, especially the one introducing the term "interested persons", would make it possible for the administration to interpret the act so as to refuse access to information. Such refusals would likely be challenged in court. Hence, the minimum expenses for citizens, companies, administration and courts would be 50 000 to 60 000 leva, Kostadinova said.

The fact that about 500 clerks would have to be trained to apply the law would be yet another expense for the state. The IME estimated a total cost of 20 000 leva a year.

"Access to information means transparency," Kostadinova said. She said that a lack of transparency negatively affects everything from a country's economy, to people's income.

"There is a direct relation between transparency and how a country's economy develops. More transparency means more government efficiency because it will have a stronger stimulus to perform better," Kostadinova said.

Currently, the draft bill is being discussed by four different committees. Depending on their vote, (expected before March 25), it will become known whether the bill will go to a first reading in Parliament.

The fact that the draft bill has not yet been published on a Government site raises doubts over the intentions of the proposed amendments.

"Some politicians obviously have a personal interest in us having less access to information. This is why the draft bill was submitted to Parliament so rapidly and secretively," said Kashumov.

According to AIPF, adopting the proposed changes would be a breach of human rights and a violation of democracy in Bulgaria.