After 19 months, the Administrative Court scheduled hearing in the dispute that we initiated against Agency for Prevention of Corruption for hiding the Decision in which it determined that DPS was illegally financed in the 2016 pre-election campaign. The Decision, the secrecy of which the Court is now deciding, has been publicly available for almost 11 months.
On October 27, the Administrative Court sent us a summons to the hearing in dispute on our lawsuit. We filed lawsuit to the Court on March 22, 2019. We remind that this is a well-known affair “Envelope”. Also, Agency for Prevention of Corruption kept its Decision, in which it determined that DPS was illegally financed in the 2016 pre-election campaign, secret for more than nine months.
Since we requested mentioned Decision of the Agency for Prevention of Corruption through free access to information, and the Agency denied us access to the document, we addressed the Administrative Court. Agency denied us access to the Decision, reasoning that document is “INTERNAL” because the procedure regarding the same matter is being conducted before the Special State Prosecutor’s Office.
However, we witness that the Agency published the disputed Decision on its own before the Administrative Court decided on our lawsuit. The Agency published the Decision on fining DPS on December 3, 2019, and we received a summons to the hearing almost a year later.
This is not the first lawsuit we have waited so long for to come before the judges of the Administrative Court, nor the only one that has waited for the situation in dispute to be resolved “by itself”.
This is just another case that we can add to the list of arguments that the promises about the duration of administrative disputes from the Public Administration Reform Strategy are just a wish list.
