Two employees of the coal mine in Tkibuli were arrested on January 26. Five days earlier, an explosion in the mine had killed a miner and injured four other workers. It was the fourth deadly incident in this mine in only 13 months. A total of ten min

In the past several months, I’ve written blog posts criticizing two data websites: the Civil Service Bureau’s income declarations website, declaration.ge, and tenders.gov.ge, developed by the State Procurement Agency. One of the problems I identified

The current evictions of IDPs in Tbilisi have dominated recent news, with ongoing protests and some opposition parties taking up the cause célèbre. The public perception is that the evictions are fundamentally unfair, yet most of the information avai

Georgia’s showing in the Global Corruption Barometer (GCB), unveiled by Transparency International on December 9th, was impressive. But the Georgian media’s coverage of the GCB was even more striking. The story was the lead on all the main evening ne

On November 4, 2010, the Georgian government's Inter-Agency Task Force for Free and Fair Elections (IATF) published its final report on local elections held on May 30, 2010. The IATF was created prior to the May 30 2010 local elections, to promote a

You don't want to mess around in Georgia. If arrested and prosecuted for a criminal offense, you only stand a 0.1% chance of being acquitted. In 2006 President Saakashvili called for “zero tolerance” of crime, and Supreme Court statistics show that t

Television ownership in Georgia remains opaque. Doubts remain about the potential impact of an amendment to the Law on Broadcasting, that was recently introduced to Parliament. A time-line of recent efforts to make media ownership transparent: On Nov

Update, 18-01-2011:A comment on the Georgian version of this post notes that the Procurement site has been updated to provide a static link to every tender announcement. This is great, because now tender announcements can be easily emailed and discus

Even resorting to a lawsuit brought no results for Transparency International Georgia in our year-long effort to obtain public information from Tbilisi City Hall on its expenditures for its office renovation. As a result, a pilot program, which was a

One issue that we have been following recently is a case of alleged fraud by high government officials in Guria, who are accused of gaining personal enrichment from a program designed to grant land to farmers. The newspaper Guria News has been invest