Komyshuvakha Town Council (Zaporizhzhia oblast) declined 21 queries sent in October by Veronika Khorolska, journalist with the Zaporizhzhia news outlet SODA collaborating with the OPORA civil society network OPORA in a research project.

The journalist reported this to Natalia Vyhovska, regional representative of the Institute of Mass Information.

“I am currently assisting in researching the safety situation in the locality and this involved submitting queries to communities. I worked with the Komyshuvakha Town Council, where I sent 21 queries asking for information on various aspects about the community. In the end, they answered all my questions by saying they did not know anything. Mind you, the queries contained very different and often easy questions. For example, the date of the community budget being adopted. They replied to all the queries with one letter, saying that they kept no records,” Veronika said.

In particular, the journalist requested information on:

  • the number of cultural institutions in the community before the start of the full-scale invasion;
  • the number of vacant positions in the executive committee’s units;
  • the ban or restrictions on mass gatherings.

Each of the queries concerned a specific topic and listed specific questions. However, the journalist says, she received one reply to all the queries, signed by the town council secretary Viktoria Korol. The two-page reply contained a list of citations linking to various bills and regulations explaining what public interest is, who the information holder is, what a query is, and what an address is. The reply closed with the conclusion: “an address is not an information query if answering it necessitates creation of new information.”

Volodymyr Zelenchuk, a lawyer at the Institute of Mass Information, said that such an reply violates both the Law “On Access to Public Information” and the Law “On Addresses by Citizens.”

“The reply is completely unsubstantiated. The queries were essentially declined. The reply deadlines were not met, there are no grounds for such a denial, even the requirements for a written denial to answer a query were not met. This can be called a ‘non-reply.’ Indeed, some questions may be viewed as addresses, not queries, but the sender was not informed about this, and the response to the query was obviously not received,” explained Volodymyr Zelenchuk.

Veronika Khorolska says she received no repy to what the Komyshuvakha Town Council viewed as “addresses”, either.