Key findings related to the transparency of the activities of the High
Council of Justice of Georgia:
 

• The problem of preliminary and timely publication of information on the Council’s sessions was again identified in 2016. There were cases when information on the session was published in the evening of the previous day or on the very day when the session was to be held. Because information on one of the sessions was published a few minutes before the session, the monitoring group was unable to attend the session.
• Agendas were not always published along with the information on sessions. In addition, the formulation of items in the agendas did not give comprehensive information on the issues to be discussed at the sessions.
• The issue of preparation for sessions is not regulated under the legislation governing the Council’s activities. In the reporting period, the Council postponed many times the making of decisions on the issues included in the agenda on the ground that the issue needed to be better studied by the Council’s members and to be better prepared. There were also cases when the review of the issue was postponed because the respective material had not been provided in a timely manner to all the members of the Council.
• In the reporting period, a number minutes of the sessions were published on the web page of the Council; however, due to the place where they were published on the web page, interested persons were not actually
able to search for them. The decisions of the Council were not published in a codified form; in addition, the Council failed to completely fulfil an obligation to proactively publish information.
• Information on the closing of the sessions was not preliminarily published within a statutory period of 7 days. In 2 cases, there were violations not only of the obligation to preliminarily publish information on the closing of the session, but the Council also failed to properly justify the need to close the sessions.