Transparency is one of the key principles of democratic governance. It refers to the obligation of public officials to allow public scrutiny of what they do while in public office, allowing citizens to obtain relevant and timely information and participate in the decision-making processes. As such, transparency is a very important element of the corruption prevention policy.
In 2020, the OSCE Mission to Skopje established formal co-operation with the State Commission for Prevention of Corruption (SCPC) by signing a Memorandum of Understanding for the period 2020-2022. Based on this partnership agreement, in 2020 the Mission supported the SCPC to further strengthen its capacities in leading a preventive anti-corruption policy in North Macedonia. One of the very important components of the cooperation was to advance transparency of the SCPC work.
As a continuation of the activities implemented in 2020, the Mission will further support the SCPC to promote transparency of its work in 2021 as well. In the frames of its regular work, SCPC produces numerous documents, most of them not timely nor adequately presented on the web page and many still not uploaded and made available for the public. Publication of official information deriving from the performance of the SCPC’s competences is also an obligation under the Law on Free Access to Public Information, as well as measure from the Open Government Partnership agenda. The only IT specialist at the SCPC has limited capacity to deliver the necessary output at due time and therefore, external assistance is needed.