Opinions & Interviews

MINSK, 6 February (BelTA) – There is a need to amend Belarus' Law on Information, Informatization and Protection of Information, Vadim Ipatov, the Director of the National Center of Legislation and Legal Research, told a press conference at BelTA on 5 February.

“Today we understand that we need further improvement, bringing the law on information, informatization and the protection of information in accordance with modern requirements,” Vadim Ipatov said. In his opinion, the law no longer fully meets the requirements of the times and the nature of public relations in the information sector.

Despite the general European trends in expanding the opportunities for individuals to obtain open data, the norms on providing publicly available information in national legislation are formulated in a fairly general way, Vadim Ipatov said. Often this causes unreasonable refusals to provide such information from state bodies and other organizations. Therefore, there is a need to specify cases in which publicly available information is not provided to citizens.

There is also a need to clarify the legal status of the owner of the information resource with the allocation of its individual components, taking into account the multi-level structure of modern information resources (forum, blog, etc.), and the fact that the rights and duties of the information resource owner are not always consider such a structure.