A planned new online platform, which would be named “Diafaneia” – transparency in Greek – was the topic of discussion at Wedesday’s session of the House institutions committee, with MPs hoping that if the bill passes into law, it will force the government to post all laws and acts passed onto it.

Committee chairman and Disy MP Demetris Demetriou, the bill’s author, said after the session that “the best antidote to corruption is transparency”.

“We must give people and officials in the services of the Republic of Cyprus the tools of transparency,” he said, before adding that all government decisions “need to be publicly accessible”.

“This is what we are seeking with the ‘Diafaneia’ platform,” he said.

He said that in the platform’s creation, there will be “difficulties”, and that the legal service has raised a number of objections, but said that efforts are now being made to correct the bill as it stands, “so that these objections, reactions, or even resistances can be allayed”.

Asked about the nature of those objections, he said that they are “constitutional and administrative and operational”.

He added that they include the question of “whether costs will increase by having to duplicate decisions on both existing websites and the new platform”, and whether parliament can oblige the government to create such a platform by passing a law.

The bill had first been proposed by Demetriou in 2021, and he said earlier this year that it foresees that “all administrative acts and decisions of the state, public sector bodies, and bodies which receive at least more than 50 per cent of resources from the state” will be posted on the platform.

The aim of his bill, he said, is to bring all the public sector’s actions into one place, and for “things to not be like today, where, to find information, you have to go to five or six websites”.

Former Disy MP Michalis Sophocleous, who had helped prepare the bill while he was in office, said in May that the bill had been put together following a nine-month consultation process, in which he had spoken to various officials from Cyprus’ public sector as well as officials from Greece’s digital governance ministry.

“The proposal is essentially an adaptation to Cyprus of the multi-award winning ‘Diavgeia’ platform which exists in Greece,” he said.

‘Diavgeia’ has been in action in Greece since 2010.

In May, Dipa MP Marinos Mousiouttas said the bill is “in a good direction” but asked whether there would be an overlap of responsibilities, given the existence of the official government gazette.