RA Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan attended today the annual gala award for freedom of information as organized since the passing of the RA Law on Freedom of Information by the Information Freedom Center every year on the 28th of September – the International Information Freedom Day.
Congratulating those present on the occasion, the Prime Minister spoke about the problems available in the field of information freedom. According to him, the modern world is based on knowledge and information and, in this respect, knowledge-based economies cannot be developed without ensuring free access to information: “This urges us to look for new approaches to the problem. We must build up such a framework as would make it possible to reveal the existing shortfalls by exposing those agencies which fail to provide information of public interest.”
Tigran Sargsyan also spoke about the importance of ensuring freedom of information throughout the public sector: “Agency performance should be assessed based on their compliance with the criterion of objective information freedom as well. We are going to submit to you the full set of per-agency criteria so that civil society could decide in future how well a piece of information reflects reality. In the first place, these criteria should specify the type and frequency of information provided by ministers and ministries. Then we will need to determine which way the government agency-civil society feedback should be structured by specifying the deadlines for agency responsiveness to applications, requests, inquiries, as well as establishing the manner in which they should work with mass media. This must be done in the institutional order.”
The head of government said to be hopeful that his participation will encourage and promote this process.
The 2009 Information Freedom Golden Keys were handed in by Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan, Director of the Information Freedom Center Shushan Doydoyan, as well as by the heads of Armenia’s Human Rights Office, USAID Armenia Office and OSCE Yerevan Office.
