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

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