On 1 June 2023, a court in Khmelnitskiy, Western Ukraine, ruled on a decision by the city’s Executive Committee refusing to provide journalist Alona Bereza with public information, stating that the decision was illegal. On April 19, the journalist, who works for local online media Zhar.Info, sent a request to the Khmelnitskiy Executive Committee, asking for information on the state of schools in the city and on the possibility of using these as air raid shelters. On April 25, the Executive Committee refused to provide the journalist with this information.
In response, Bereza filed a complaint against this decision in court. In its ruling, judges in the case said that local authorities did not justify the grounds for refusing the journalist’s request, nor did they refer to any regulations which would forbid providing the information. Additionally, the court ruled that the Khmelnitskiy Executive Committee did not prove that publishing the information on local schools would harm Ukraine’s national security, territorial integrity or public order. The ruling can be appealed in court.
UPDATE: On 24 October 2023, Alona Bereza said that Zhar.Info was able to obtain some information from local authorities in Khmelnitskiy, as well as in two other towns in Khmelnitskiy region, on defence spending in the region, which authorities earlier claimed could not be disclosed due to martial law, after appealing to the Ukrainian parliament’s human rights ombudsman office. After the ombudsman intervened highlighting that according to current laws Bereza was allowed to obtain the information she requested despite martial law, local authorities provided the journalist with the documents she had requested.
UPDATE: On 31 October 2023, Alona Bereza said that Zhar.Info appealed the decision by a local administrative court in Khmelnitskiy, on the grounds that the media outlet’s request for information had only been partially satisfied. Bereza said that while the court agreed that local authorities should not have declared information on the use of schools as bomb shelters as “information for [exclusive, civil] service use”, it did not oblige local authorities to provide the information to journalists either.