PRESS RELEASE
On the occasion of the completion of
“Enhancing Access to Information” Project
Jordan Transparency Center (JTC) held a press conference announcing the successful completion of its project “Enhancing Access to Information”. The project was funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, and executed by JTC during the period 1 March 2017 to 30 June 2018.
The project was co-executed by Sanad Association for Thought and Youth Action, the Arab Union for Development of Human Resources, Imdad Media Center, the International Center for Governance and Sustainable Development, the Youth Leadership Association and Sama Eladala Society for Political Development and Human Rights.
Seven Government Agencies participated in the project, namely the Ministries of Education, Health, Justice, Finance and Agriculture, as well as the Jordanian Customs Department and the Department of Statistics.
The Ministry of Social Development, and the Ministry of Political and Parliamentary Affairs took the lead in overseeing the proper execution of the project. Moreover, the Information Council extended their support throughout the project, as did the Carter Center, where it agreed the use of its global methodology “Implementation Assessment Tool”.
The objective of the project is to enhance the application of “Access to Information Law No. 47 of 2007” (the Law) among the above Government Agencies by discussing and agreeing the best practices for the successful implementation of the Law.
The project focused on exchanging and sharing experiences, and knowledge with the participating Government Agencies, and involved the use of Carter International Center’s methodology.
The project comprised two phases. The first focused on the theoretical aspect, where many training and awareness workshops were held. The second phase included field visits to the Government Agencies by the project team.
The expected Project Deliverables have been achieved, including the development of an Operating Model based on best practices, and the promotion of partnership and dialogue with officials of participating Government Agencies.
On the most important observations and recommendations of the project, in terms of Classification of Information, four Agencies did not develop any guidelines or systems for the classification of documents and information, while the other three Agencies have made some progress in this direction.
The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has recently addressed the issue of classification of information and documents in their Open Government Data Policy that has been recently circulated under the term “Open Government Data”.
The recommendation in this respect is to handle the Classification of Information process in the context of the implementation of the “Open Government Data Policy”, provided that this is superseded by the establishment of clear and uniform provisions and instructions governing the classification process, and under the guidance of the steering committee referred to in the said policy, to avoid duplication and scattering of efforts.
With regard to the Internal Control Function, it was observed that internal control units in the seven Agencies do not perform any oversight / audit functions with regard to the application of the Law in terms of performance control, adequacy of operating procedures, etc.
Internal Control officials within the seven Agencies attributed this to the fact that the Internal Control System and its Amendments No. 3 of 2011 do not touch on this matter, while Article 8, Paragraph 4, in the aforementioned system explicitly states that Internal Control should ascertain the application of all legislations in force.
The recommendation in this respect is to approach the Central Internal Control Unit at the Ministry of Finance requesting amendment of the provisions of the instructions issued under the aforementioned system to include ATI Law.
As to Proactive Disclosure, the seven Agencies have well developed their websites, and made available lot of service and non-service-related information that may be used in the preparation of studies, research, press reports, and others, thus promoting proactive disclosure.
Three Agencies have also made the above information available on their social media sites, and are updating such sites real-time.
FAQ section is available only within the websites of three Agencies, which include some topics that may be given the status of non-service information.
The recommendation in this respect is to share documents and information that are of benefit to the public, and which have been previously requested and answered, on their websites and social media sites and updating them on timely basis.
As for Receiving and Responding to Information Requests, customer service departments within the Agencies receive written information requests directly from the information applicant, while many information requests are received through other means such as websites, e-mail, and occasionally through the official website of the e-government. The latter requests are handled by either an IT officer, or the Media and Public Relations Officer, or the Agency’s Liaison Officer at the Information Council.
Moreover, it was observed that except for two Agencies, the receipt, follow-up, processing and systematic delivery of information to non-paper based applications are not properly documented, and thus making this process impaired, especially in the absence of written operating procedures that describe the flow of work.
The recommendation in this respect is reorganize the flow of work so that information requests irrespective of the source, are channeled to a central party, which will assume responsibility for receiving, recording, routing to the concerned authority, tracking and delivering the information to the applicant, preserving and archiving them and providing statistical information related thereto.
Amman on 30/6/2018
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