THE TEMPORAL STABILITY OF ROMANIA’S FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT – A NEOINSTITUTIONALIST APPROACH

The paper discusses the temporal stability of Romania’s Freedom of Information Act (Law no. 544/2001), using a neoinstitutionalist paradigm. I argue that none of the five amending laws of Law no. 544/2001 did not change the fundamentals and mechanisms of granting access to public information that existed when this law entered into force, all of them being limited and even beneficial. I will demonstrate that the most important difficulties that appear in the enforcement of Law no. 544/2001 do not come from the perspective this law was written, but from the interpretation of the legal norms according to some subjective practices existing at the level of public authorities/institutions depositing the information.