Open Data Bill in North Macedonia Triggers New Transparency Concerns

Rather than opening government up to scrutiny, experts say a new bill on open data in North Macedonia risks introducing new restrictions on transparency. The bill on open data and the reuse of public sector information, drafted by the Digital Transformation Ministry, requires all open data to be made available in machine-readable formats, so that anyone can use and distribute the numbers. But it also specifies that anyone wishing to use the data to “create new information, content, applications, or services” will have to seek permission from the institution behind the data in question. Likewise, institutions will be required to designate an “open data officer” who would have to respond to user requests within 20 days, but the bill fails to specify which users will need to seek permission, under what circumstances and for which open datasets. “The gold standard for open data is clear: anyone can freely and without charge use, reuse, and distribute them, with proper source attribution and under the same conditions,” said German Filkov, head of the Centre for Civic Communications, CCC, an anti-corruption watchdog. “These provisions in the draft are unclear and leave wide room for arbitrary behaviour by data holders,” Filkov told BIRN. “If left as is, I believe they’ll cause problems in practice.” What’s specific about open data is that it should be published in its original form as created by institutions, not processed or interpreted. A dataset is considered open when, for example, the Employment Agency publishes Excel spreadsheets with unemployment figures by city, and not when it sends out a press release containing only certain numbers. The benefit to the public is clear in the practice of Time.mk, North Macedonia’s most popular news aggregator, which pulls data from the public procurement website, where all tenders are posted in machine-readable format but for which the search function is complicated. Time.mk is able to simplify the data for regular readers, without seeking permission. The Digital Transformation Ministry did not consent to an interview but replied to BIRN’s questions via email. In one response, the ministry gave a few examples of who or what would require permission under the draft law: “An IT company developing a transport schedule app, a journalist creating visualisations using data from the State Statistical Office, or a startup using geographic data.” Misha Popovic of the Skopje-based think tank Institute for Democracy said the example of the journalist was particularly troubling. “Imagine every journalist who wants to present census results having to request and wait for permission,” he said. Popovic disputed the ministry’s claim that the bill is in accordance with the European Union’s 2019 Open Data Directive. The directive, he said, clearly distinguishes between already published data and formal requests for access to unreleased data. Furthermore, restrictions are only allowed in exceptional cases, such as protecting privacy or critical infrastructure, unlike in the ministry’s draft, which would allow institutions themselves to define which datasets require reuse permission. “In the EU directive, the option to restrict or control access via requests, in my reading, doesn’t exist,” Popovic told BIRN. Current practice in North Macedonia does not bode well. Under North Macedonia’s Law on Access to Public Information law, journalists or members of the public can request access to information that is not publicly available by submitting a formal request to the institution in question, which has 20 days to respond. But this right is also being eroded. The state-funded Agency for Access to Public Information, which is tasked with making sure public bodies uphold rules on free access to public information, said that so far this year – up to late September – it had received exactly 500 complaints that institutions had not responded. That compares with 354 complaints for the whole of 2024, the year that the current ruling party, the right-wing VMRO-DPMNE, took office. “We still have over three months left in the year, so the number will rise,” said the agency’s director, Plamenka Bojcheva. BIRN’s own experience reflects this trend. This year, responding to a request from BIRN, the public enterprise Railways Infrastructure refused to release a feasibility study on the current government’s plan to introduce commuter trains in the capital, Skopje, saying there was “no public interest” in its release. Even after the Agency for Access to Public Information ordered it to do so, the document remains under wraps. The Ministry of Health has not responded for over six months to BIRN questions regarding the company awarded a contract for sterilisation in state-run health clinics. In another case this year, the State Audit Office rejected a BIRN request for the names of the auditors who worked on political party reports, citing security concerns, only to later say it does not know which auditors conducted the work. The Anti-Corruption Commission refused access to archived documents related to the English language certificate of Bojan Hristovski, head of the National Security Agency, citing personal data protection rules; when the Agency for Access to Public Information overruled, the Anti-Corruption Commission sued the agency. Only after six months of appeals and a court ruling was the document released. Bojcheva said her agency’s hands are often tied. “They don’t act on our rulings, and we have no enforcement tools, except to initiate minor offence procedures against officials,” she told BIRN. “In a recent case, the staff proved they did everything in their power to provide the requested information but weren’t supported by the leadership.” This publication was produced with the financial support of the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of BIRN and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.