OFFICIAL LAUNCH OF THE “CHOOSE THE RIGHT DIRECTION: INTEGRITY” CAMPAIGN

At today’s press conference, the campaign “Choose the Right Direction: Integrity” was launched with the goal of promoting integrity as a key foundation of society and democracy, as well as one of the EU’s founding principles. The integrity campaign is part of the European Union-funded project “Promoting the transparency and accountability of public administration in the Republic of North Macedonia”, whose beneficiaries are the Agency for the Protection of the Right to Free Access to Public Information and the State Commission for the Prevention of Corruption.

The main message of the campaign “Choose the right direction: Integrity” is that every citizen can influence the level of integrity through everyday personal decisions and choices. The refusal of everyone as an individual, as an individual to participate in corrupt practices and the disclosure of corruption and other illegal and unethical behaviours by monitoring the operation of the public administration, are among those choices that should be encouraged. For this purpose, citizens can use the constitutionally guaranteed right of access to public information.

“One of the ways to monitor the work of the public administration is exercising the right of access to public information, so citizens are informed about the work of the administration, and especially about the spending of budget funds, that is, public money. With this project, in which we perform with the slogan “I want to know”, I expect to achieve increased visibility of the Agency for the Protection of the Right to Free Access to Public Information to encourage citizens to exercise their constitutional right to access information about the activities of the institutions and the costs of their operations, to educate them on how to exercise their right and how to contact us if the holders of information from whom they requested did not provide them with the information”, said the director of the Agency, Plamenka Bojcheva.