Decisions of Durres City Council uploaded in CPII’s online database

For the first time ever, all Durres citizens can access online all decisions issued by the Municipality council. CPII has recently established an electronic database which contains all decision issued from 2007 till nowadays, approximately 254. Though Durres municipality has an official website of its own, the city council decision text body do get uploaded there by the municipality administration.

The database is linked in the CPII official website www.infocip.org and is available free of charge to those who want to make use or have an interest to know city legislation. Any decision of the Durres Municipality Council can be downloaded in PDF format, without any limitation by those interested.

The Citizen’s Transparency Office in Durres, established on May 2011, in close cooperation with CPII, submitted an official request to Durres Municipality, based on legal provisions of the “right to Information law”, no 8503, asking to access all city council decisions from 2007 till nowadays. The request was granted (with some delays, though) by the Municipality Administration and the process of digitalization started by the beginning of June. By the end of July, the process was concluded successfully and some 259 Decisions of the City Council (of the four years, 2007-2011) were scanned and linked in the CPII database website, under the category of Acts Database.

Obviously, the content of acts database is only in Albanian because its only target group of users are Albanian Citizens. The city acts database of Durres is a direct outcome of the project, titled:  “Promoting the Accountability of Local Government, Albania”, supported by National Endowment for Democracy, NED.

This database is not simply local. CPII has managed so far to upload all enacted local legislation of the  Tirana City Council, Korca City Council, and now Fieri is on the process of uploading. CPII intends to establish a full national database of local government acts,

Albania suffers extreme lack of transparency in publicizing local governments acts. Under this circumstances, CPII is offering an efficient model, open to all and easy to access by anyone, of a unified national portal online where acts of ever municipality can be published. CPII considers this a major achievement, which was made possible due to the support given initially by OSFA and now from NED.