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Government PR: Accountability and professional exchange

by Manuela Anastasova

KAS expert Christian Spahr presents SEECOM's priorities

The head of KAS Media Program South East Europe, Christian Spahr, spoke about accountability of governments and professional exchange of government communicators at a plenary meeting of the Club of Venice on 5-6 June in Riga.

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The Club of Venice is an informal expert association of chief communications officers of the European authorities and governments of the EU member countries. Topics of the meeting were among others the European Elections 2014 and government communication at the service of citizens.

Christian Spahr introduced some of the priorities of the association for PR experts from state institutions, SEECOM. It was co-founded by KAS Media Program South East Europe in September 2013 in Montenegro. Spahr put an emphasis on the association’s programme for transparency, accountability and the public participation in government communication. SEECOM aims also at establishing high professional and ethical standards of political communication through professional exchange between public sector communicators.

In addition, Spahr discussed the "Right to information" (RTI) laws and their application as an instrument to leverage transparency: "In Central and Eastern Europe, RTI laws play a particularly important role. They have helped to make politics more transparent after the system had changed. Today, there are more RTI laws in this region than in Western countries, and they are often more progressive." Besides, Spahr referred to a survey of KAS Media Program South East Europe on the RTI law in Serbia. It shows that journalists have rated the law as good, but the cooperation of authorities needs further improvement.

On invitation of the conference organisers, the KAS expert talked also about the way digital topics are organised in the German government: "The government has bundled technical and economical issues of the digital sector in the ministry of transport, making it a comprehensive department of infrastructure. In addition, the government created a new Parliament committee for Digital Agenda which was positively registered both by the industry and the Net community."

The whole speech of Christian Spahr is available here.

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