Publication of Phone Tapping Data According to the Nature of the Crime and Geographic Area (GE0054)

Publication of phone tapping data according to the nature of the crime and geographic area; The given commitment is a prominent example of the cooperation of the government and the civil society. By the recommendation of the Forum member NGOs, in the framework of the second Action Plan of the Open Government Georgia, the Supreme Court of Georgia started to proactively publish phone tapping statistics. Due to this fact, Georgia entered a small group of countries where such data is publicly disclosed. Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) of OGP marked this commitment of the second Action Plan as ‘starred’ commitment. In addition, the IRM report noted that data shall be published in such a manner that it can be sorted by crime and geographic area. The Chairperson of the Supreme Court directly reacted to the recommendation and stated that the court would adopt this as a new commitment in the framework of the Third Action Plan of OGP. Hence, the court plans to introduce new statistical reporting forms that will allow for obtaining and publishing detailed phone tapping data, as well as processing the data according to the crime differentiation and courts. Data will be published in Excel files on the website http://www.supremecourt.ge under the section of OGP, on the News block and Statistics link. Date of Implementation: 2016-2017; Issues to be Addressed: Currently only aggregated data of phone tapping are being published. Data will be published according to the differentiation of crime and geographic area in order to obtain more detail information. Main Objective: Disclosure of the closed data; provision of maximum transparency of the judiciary.

13. Publication of phone tapping data according to the nature of the crime and geographic area

Commitment Text:

The given commitment is a prominent example of the cooperation of the government and the civil society. By the recommendation of the Forum member NGOs, in the framework of the second Action Plan of the Open Government Georgia, the Supreme Court of Georgia started to proactively publish phone tapping statistics. Due to this fact, Georgia entered a small group of countries where such data is publicly disclosed. Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) of OGP marked this commitment of the second Action Plan as ‘starred’ commitment.

In addition, the IRM report noted that data shall be published in such a manner that it can be sorted by crime and geographic area. The Chairperson of the Supreme Court directly reacted to the recommendation and stated that the court would adopt this as a new commitment in the framework of the Third Action Plan of OGP.

Hence, the court plans to introduce new statistical reporting forms that will allow for obtaining and publishing detailed phone tapping data, as well as processing the data according to the crime differentiation and courts. Data will be published in Excel files on the website http://www.supremecourt.ge under the section of OGP, on the News block and Statistics link.

Responsible institution: Supreme Court of Georgia

Supporting institution(s): None

Start date: July 2016 End date: January 2017

Commitment Aim:

In accordance with IRM recommendations from the 2015 IRM progress report, the Supreme Court committed to publishing phone-tap data broken down by the nature and geographic distribution of crimes. The Supreme Court pledged to publish this data in Microsoft Excel files on its website.   

Status

Midterm: Complete

The commitment was completed by the midterm. The Supreme Court started publishing the new data in January 2017. The data was published in PDF format and provided six-months of statistics based on the type of crime for which the courts granted the phone-tap motions. The data included the Criminal Code articles that suspects were charged with, the number of requests by the Prosecutor’s Office to grant the motions for phone taps, and the number of motions that were granted, partially granted or not granted at all. In a separate PDF file, the Supreme Court provided geographic distribution of District Courts, the number of motions discussed by those courts, and the number of motions they granted, partially granted or denied.

While the commitment had already been completed, the Court started publishing the aforementioned data in Excel spreadsheets per the initial pledge. [41] This is an improvement since it allows interested parties to better reuse this data for their own purposes.

Did It Open Government?

Access to Information: Marginal

Given this commitment was carried forward from the previous action plan and envisaged publishing already available data but in a more disaggregated way, it only minorly increased openness within the court system. Before, phone-tap data was not disaggregated by the nature and geographic distribution of crimes. It only included the number of prosecutorial motions for phone taps and the number of motions granted. This data was published in PDF format.

Further, while this data is used by some watchdog CSOs, such as IDFI, other CSOs and the wider public are either unaware of its existence or find it lacks useful details, which are concealed due to state security considerations. TI and the Georgian Young Lawyers' Association (GYLA) think the data is still very general and does not allow for rigorous analysis of government practice in the field. For instance, the existing data is not broken down by categories of persons for which the courts grant phone-tap motions and there is no data on how many phone records are destroyed by the Prosecutor’s Office after the completion of their investigative activities.

Carried Forward?

The commitment was not carried into the new Action Plan 2018−2019.