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

Update, 21 December 2010: The CSB has fixed the linking issue which I described in this post--that is excellent, and I hope they will keep working to improve the site. Original post: Putting data online is the hot new trend in transparency for govern

Georgia ranks 68th in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) 2010, published on October 26. Georgia’s score is 3.8 on a scale from 10 (very clean) to 0 (highly corrupt). The CPI measures the degree to which public sector corr

At a recent meeting of the NGO IDP network “Synergia”, we learned that local NGOs – especially those based outside Tbilisi – still have very little access to news about government strategies and new policy documents, despite a self-professed demand a

When an individual or an organization like ours sends an official request for information to a Tbilisi court, the response these days is likely to be along the following lines: “The information you have requested requires a systematization and the de

Update 20 Oct. 2010: We have been informed that about a week ago, investigators arrested two of the auction winners. According to the investigators, Rustavi City Hall employees are also being questioned and soon a decision regarding whether to charge

A number of incidents that involved outspoken government critics in Mestia this spring and summer have stifled opposition voices in Svaneti during a period of intense government investments into the region’s tourism potential. Five months after oppos

An article published two days ago by Interpress News (access required) inaccurately reported that the Tbilisi City Council had secured assurance from the Ministry of Refugees and Accommodation (MRA) that IDPs living in five buildings in Tbilisi would

In late August we received a call from an IDP who claimed that the new settlements were no longer receiving electricity subsidies. After the government’s failure in fall 2009 to properly warn IDPs of cuts to their energy subsidies (resulting in many

The Georgian Chamber of Control (CoC) has stepped into the spotlight lately through several recent high-profile inquiries. This is an encouraging show of institutional strength, but it remains to be seen whether the recent positive trends in the agen