First Session of the Council for the Open Government Partnership Initiative Held

On Monday 5 March, the first session of the Council for the Open Government Partnership initiative was held in the premises of the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs within this initiative in Croatia.

 

The Council is an advisory body to the Government of Croatia and the aim of its activities is to encourage transparency and openness in the work of public authority bodies and participation of citizens and civil society in shaping public policy. The Council has 19 members who are representatives of state administration bodies (Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, the Office of the President of Croatia, the Office of the President of the Croatian Parliament, the Office of the Croatian Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister for Home, Foreign and European Policies, Ministries of Administration, Finance, and Justice respectively, the Government Office for Cooperation with NGOs, Personal Data Protection Agency), and the representatives of the Institute of Public Finance, Croatian Association of Counties, Association of Cities, Association of Municipalities, Croatian Journalists’ Association, as well as 4 representatives of civil society organizations and the academic community.

 

In line with the initiative’s priorities, the Republic of Croatia expressed its readiness to support the principles of transparency, fight against corruption, empowering citizens and using the capacity of new technologies to enable public authority bodies on all levels to have better efficiency and accountability thus creating prerequisites for more efficient and innovative public service provision and public resource management.

 

Countries members of the Open Government Partnership are obliged to draw up Action Plans with clearly defined measures and activities with deadlines for their implementation. Taking into account the rather short deadline for submitting the Action Plan to the initiative’s Steering Committee (9 April), the members of the Council were brought up to date with the  flowchart of activities which was made according to the predefined dates for the following annual meeting of the Open Government Partnership in Brazil, set for 17-18 April 2012. It was envisaged that the Action Plans of all countries members of the initiative would be presented on the occasion.

 

The Government Office for Cooperation with NGOs is the body charged with providing the Council with technical and expert support, timely reporting about current and future activities, and putting draft Action Plan up for public consultations.