At present, the free access to official information is insufficient, Info-Prim Neo reports, citing the conclusions of the quarterly report on monitoring access to official information in Moldova, published by the Acces-Info Center. According to the Center's director Vasile Spinei, the recent efforts by the authorities to make access to information a reality have been mostly futile. Spinei maintains there's a big discrepancy between what the officials declare about the necessity of ensuring freedom of expression and the actual levels of access to official information in Moldova. “There are no clear policies to ensure that these rights can be properly exercised, while the Parliament and the Government are poorly monitoring the enforcement of the relevant legislation”, he added. According to the report, high chances are that, in search for information of public nature, one would not only get refused but also brushed off. At the same time, the report shows there's no proper institutional framework for optimizing the activity of the public administration personnel dealing with collecting and disseminating information of public concern. Insufficiently regulated is the decision-making process as well, and this generates distrust among the population and leads to a poor knowledge and understanding of laws. Vasile Botnaru, one of the project's experts, believes that in order to improve things in the filed it is key to adopt a proactive approach in ensuring access to information by integrating such principles in every national strategy and policy. Also, there is a need for closer cooperation with the nongovernmental sector in this field, Botnaru pointed out. The team of 14 experts that conducted the monitoring rated the access to official information in the first quarter of the year at 2.09 points on a scale from 0 to 5. The measuring of the access to information levels has been done by the Acces-Info Center as part of the Strengthening the Monitoring Capacity of the Civil Society in Moldova Project. The report is financed by the U.S. Government through the Millennium Challenge Corp.