Featured Commitment – Georgia

Country: Georgia
Commitment: Proactive publication of surveillance statistics in Georgia
National Action Plan: 2014-2015

To shed light on surveillance activities, the Supreme Court of Georgia started publishing statistics on hearing the motions regarding operative investigative activities, such as phone tapping. Initially, the Supreme Court started producing statistics on phone tapping as a response to the high public interest on this issue. Shortly after that, as part of the commitmentOGP commitments are promises for reform co-created by governments and civil society and submitted as part of an action plan. Commitments typically include a description of the problem, concrete action... in Georgia’s OGP Action PlanAction plans are at the core of a government’s participation in OGP. They are the product of a co-creation process in which government and civil society jointly develop commitments to open governmen... 2014-15 and following the amendments to the Criminal Procedures Code, the Court started proactively publishing yearly statistics, since October 2014, and then quarterly statistics, since 2015.

The information published on the Court’s website includes the number of motions on phone tapping submitted by the prosecutors to the courts and the number of motions granted by the courts. To further improve the existing practice, civil society recommends that the next step could be breaking down the published data by types and severity of crimes, the geographic distribution of prosecutor’s offices requesting motions and the courts granting or denying those motions.

This commitment might be making Georgia one of the few countries in the world that proactively publishes surveillance data. The fact that Supreme Court is the main responsible agency shows that OGP, which started as an executive initiative, has expanded to other branches of the government, including the judiciaryWhile a majority of open government reforms occur within the executive branch, OGP members are increasingly taking on commitments to increase the openness of the judicial branch. Technical specificati....