Analytics, EU – Baltic States, Forum, Latvia, Legislation

Edgars Rinkevics at the Open Government Partnership Summit in London. Photo: flickr.com

Minister Rinkevics highly commended the goals of the Open Government Partnership and confirmed that Latvia, since joining the initiative last year, had focused on a clearly identifiable administrative and legal change with the aim of strengthening an effective and open public administration. Latvia has fulfilled 13 practical measures out of 17 objectives defined in the action plan. The minister named a successful example: online broadcasts of Latvian Government sessions, which promotes greater public awareness of decision making process.

“To continue improving the quality of public involvement in decision making processes, it is planned by 2016 to create an integrated portal for the development and harmonization of draft legislation in Latvia," the foreign minister pointed out. This is necessary in order to facilitate the transparency in decision making and drafting government documents, to give an opportunity for the public to quickly obtain clear information on planning documents currently in progress and contribute to drafting those documents. The portal would enable each individual, not only representatives from non-governmental organizations, to offer their proposals in the process of drafting legislation and urge public institutions to provide motivated answers about the progress of those proposals.

Rinkevics also outlined the main objectives of reducing corruption, ensuring the predictability of tax policy, improving the functioning of the justice system, as well as increasing the efficiency of public administration. It is important to create an environment where corruption risk prevention measures would ensure a uniform practice in combating corruption in all the State and local government institutions. Rinkevics emphasized one of the tasks to achieve that: to enhance legal framework for identifying the public officials’ positions subject to the risk of corruption. It is also necessary to publicize information about all the vacancies in public institutions, while paying attention to open recruitment procedures, subject to uniform principles and criteria for the evaluation of candidates.

The Open Government Partnership aims to promote good governance at the international level in regard to the accessibility of public services, fighting corruption, ensuring budget transparency and that of allocating public resources, as well as public and environmental security, in order to facilitate and improve the dialogue between public authorities and civic society.