IMI helped to defend the right to access information about land allocation in the first instance court

On September 15, the  District administrative court of Kyiv city partly satisifed the claim of the chief editor of the website “No to Corruption!” Olha Burda, who in 2015 tried to get from the Kyiv city state administration the names of people who were granted land plots in Desnianskyi district. Answering to the request, the Department of Land Resources of Kyiv City State Administration did provide the list of the resolutions of the Kyiv Council, yet the answer did not indicate the names of people who were given the land plots. At that, the resolutions with the names were already published in the Internet at the web-site “Liga”. Also, the documents that served as the basis for land allocation, but this question was simply ignored by the administration. The claim was filed against Kyiv City State Administration and the Department, several sessions were held, and then the lawsuit was shifted to short procedure. The court made its judgment in more than one year: it satisfied the claim to the Department of Land Resources, but not to State Administration as a whole (because the court decided the Department was in charge of providing the full information under the request). Roman Holovenko, one of the IMI lawyers, who represented the claimant in the court, said: “the long consideration of cases in the District Administrative Court of Kyiv city is, unfortunately, a typical thing. We are satisfied with the resolution of the first instance court, but, as we see, the lawful judgment of the court can often be cancelled out by the long period of waiting for it (even without any attempts to draw out the process by the other party). We already received the copies of Kyiv Council decision, but we will probably have to struggle to get the documents they were based on".