In Ukraine, a survey was conducted on the abuse of local self-government bodies: the ombudsman

Recently, the Office of the Ombudsman initiated an information campaign aimed at combating the phenomenon known as “paper terrorism”. This phenomenon consists in sending a large number of requests for information to government agencies, which complicates their work. In addition to the analysis of appeals, the Office of the Ombudsman, in cooperation with partners, prepared an analytical report report based on the results of a survey of state and local self-government bodies regarding abuses of the constitutional rights to access information and appeal.

The main causes of abuse

The analytical report singles out several key reasons for the abuse of the right to information and appeals:

• The imperfection and obsolescence of the legislation on citizen appeals and access to public information.
• Illegal motives of information requesters or applicants.
• Lack of legal liability and other safeguards to prevent such abuses.

The most common types of abuse

The main and most common types of abuse include:

• Sending a large number of requests and requests identical in content in a short period of time both from the same person and from different people.
• Uniformity of appeals to a significant number of addressees, which leads to the simultaneous consideration of the same appeal by many authorities.
• Submission of appeals with a request to send it to another addressee.
• Systemic abuse of the right to oral appeal.
• The use of obscene and offensive language in the texts of appeals.
• Abuse of the right to review the appeal directly by the head of the authority and other types of abuse.

The need for changes to the legislation

As a result, to eliminate this problem, changes to the legislation are necessary. The Office of the Ombudsman, together with partners, is already working on specific proposals for legislative changes aimed at improving mechanisms to prevent abuse of the right to information and appeal.

These proposals will be aimed at:

• Improvement of legislation on citizens’ appeals and access to public information.
• Establishment of legal responsibility for persons who abuse their rights.
• Implementation of effective safeguards to avoid similar abuses in the future.