Freedom of Information Center of Armenia.

The project envisages:

• Organizing an annual conference within the frames of the Open Governance Partnership Global Initiative, with participation of around 50 governmental and civil society representatives.
• Developing a monitoring tool based on the Independent Monitoring Mechanism and other international experiences to monitor the Government’s compliance with OGP commitments to provide needs based support to the Civil Society Forum in monitoring and implementation of the OGP Action Plan of Armenia.
• Training the civil society forum members on how to use the monitoring tool. The monitoring and data collection through the tool will be delegated to CSOs engaged in the Civil Society Forum in order to assist the Forum to develop an alternative assessment report on implementation of the Second OGP Action Plan (AP) of Armenia.
• Development and presentation of an Assessment Report on the Governments implementation of the Second AP.
• Production and dissemination of a monthly newsletter on OGP in Armenia. It is planned to produce 3 issues of the newsletter.
• Development of IDC expert opinions. It is planned that 6 cases will be examined during the project implementation. The final expert opinions will be widely disseminated to the case parties, media, advocates, courts, and other target groups.
• Maintaining IDC website as a centralized web resource, where not only IDC opinions are published, but also research on defamation related court cases, principles of objective disputes resolution, protection mechanisms for journalists in court cases, alternative ways for solving information disputes will be presented.
• Organizing one joint workshop with journalists and lawyers with participation of journalists and litigators, including those who represent clients in freedom of expression litigation. It is planned to organize the workshop outside Yerevan, bringing together 10 lawyers and 15 representatives from the media.
• Publication of the “Know-How” User Guide on Libel and Defamation among all judges of RA.

The project is supported by the OSCE Yerevan Office. Project duration is 7 months (09 March 2015 - 09 October 2015).