Odesa OMA says queries by NikCenter are "paperwork terrorism"

law.com

The Odesa Oblast Military Administration (OVA) refused to provide reporters with the investigative journalism center NikCenter with the list of persons who were nominated for state awards during the war.

The NikCenter team reported this to the Institute of Mass Information representative in Mykolaiv oblast.

In August, NikCenter submitted a query to the OMA, asking for the full names of those nominees who are not in the army, as well as the dates, reasons and merits for which they were nominated for state awards. On September 10, the OMA wrote back, providing an incomplete answer to the journalists' query: for instance, with only the nominees' initials listed instead of the full names and patronymics. Moreover, the administration's reply did not include the grounds for the state award nominations or the merits for which the persons were so honored.

The journalists wrote to the administration again, asking them for more specific data, but the OMA refused.

On September 16, the Odesa Oblast Military Administration said in a letter to the media outlet that the journalists' stance "may be dangerous" for the people whose data they want to know.

"Considering that amidst the Russian Federation's armed aggression against Ukraine, our country is seeing active attempts at sabotage, reconnaissance and other activities aimed at undermining the authority of the state and the country's overall defense capability (including with the use of information received from state bodies through the mechanisms provided by law), your efforts to fully identify the persons may cause harm, which the Odesa Oblast State (Military) Administration cannot allow," says the letter signed by the Odesa OMA chief of staff, Volodymyr Zavadskyi.

The official also quoted the Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets, who has mentioned so-called "paperwork terrorism", when Ukrainians deliberately send many information queries to state bodies in order to overload them.

Yevhen Vorobyov, a media lawyer with the NGO "Human Rights Platform" said in a comment to NikCenter that the Odesa OMA was wrong in their refusal to provide the journalists with complete data on the state awards nominees.

"Last name, first name, and patronymics alone do not allow you to identify a person, but only when combined with other information about them: their ID number, the series and number of their passport, their address, date and place of birth, etc. are what enables you to precisely identify a person and as such are personal data subject to protection. Moreover, the information holder did not consider that the requested information is of public interest," explained the lawyer.

In a comment of the regional representative of the Institute of Mass Information, NikCenter journalist Olesya Boreyko said that the team has already filed a complaint with the office of the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights regarding the violation of the right to access information by the Odesa OMA.