The Voters’ Committee of Ukraine is going to hand a claim to court against the Supreme Council of the Crimea, since the latter does not answer the informational requests of the organization

On 25 February the press conference of the Alliance “Maydan” was held in UNIAN. Participants of the conference discussed the practices of illegal classification of normative-legal acts and other documents

Journalists were not admitted to a session of the Chuguev town council.

This is confirmed by 11 edicts with classification “not for publishing” out of 148 edicts signed by Viktor Yushchenko. Similar number of edicts with this classification was signed by Leonid Kuchma every month.

221 normative-legal acts and 10391 acts, which have been registered in Ukraine from the moment of establishment of state registration of normative-legal acts (from 1 January 1993 to 21 January 2005) have classifications “for service use only”, “secret” and “top secret”

Leader of the Christian-Liberal party Leonid Chernovetskiy reckons that many “surprises” in the form of illegally classified normative acts of force agencies are waiting for new Ukrainian power. He believes that the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine is responsible for this situation.

On 24 November 2004 the Lugansk regional council issued the decision, which prohibited the regional communal enterprise “Lugansk cable television” to transmit the telecast of the TRC “Era” and “5th channel”. After the complaint to the National council in charge of TV and radio broadcasting the decision was cancelled.

Along with the letter the “Prava ludyny” editorial board publishes the statistics concerning the normative acts with classifications “not for printing”, “not for publishing” and “for service use only” issued by the President of Ukraine and the organs of state power.

The access of candidates to presidency to mass media and the context of presentation of information on election in different mass media are the subjects of the research carried out by the Institute of mass information, international human rights protecting organization “Article 19” and the Kharkov group for human rights protection. In what follows we present the results of the monitoring.

The human rights protector turned to the General Prosecutor’s office with the informational request, but got no answer. Then he turned to court, which satisfied the complaint and obliged the General Prosecutor’s office to respond to the request.

The participants of the oblast conference “The fourth power of the Poltava oblast: examination for independence”, which was carried out in Poltava on the eve of the Day of journalists, appealed to the administration of the oblast and town to stop the disgraceful war against the sellers of newspapers.

A deputy of the Chortkiv town council was driven out from the plenary sitting for the attempt to make ther audio record of the sitting.

The Crimean branch of the Voters’ Committee of Ukraine summed up the results of realization of the program and drew the conclusion that the majority of the subjects of political process inertly reacted to the requests of voters and public organizations representing the interests of citizens.

On 17 February the Kharkov group for human rights protection conducted the regular meeting of the working group in charge of the questions of the freedom of expression. The round table “Access to information in Ukraine. Improvement of legislation and practices” was held in the framework of the meeting.

The information appeared on the site that the materials of the monitoring of budget-2003 had been temporary deleted in the connection with revision of the renewed strategy of representing the materials

The continuation of the article analyzing is presented of the ways to restrict the access to information using illegal classifications of secret documents (see the previous issue).