[3] However, despite the existence of a legal framework regulating access to public information and providing rules for its implementation, transparency has yet to take roots in Romanian institutional culture.
Domestic statutes transposing EU directives mandating for public access to information were riddled with multiple exemptions that Romanian authorities largely exploited.
[5] The Law was the result of a consultation process which is considered a best practice in terms of civil society's cooperation with political actors.
Also, for public access to environmental information, a special Governmental Decision was adopted in 2005, applying the Aarhus Convention.
[2][4] The media and civil society organisations embraced the FOI law in order to create practices and monitoring tools, sometimes using institutional support for consolidating good practices or more confrontational approaches, such as suing state bodies on the FOIA to test the scope of the law's applicability and creating legal precedents.
[4] In 2003 the Pro Democracy Association published a report after having monitored for a year the way in which Romanian authorities applied the law.
One of the main findings of the study was that the number of FOI requests was quite low, because of a lack of knowledge among citizens and companies of this right and the relevant law.
[6] In some cases, these ways seem to be well established 'modus operandi' by public bodies that exploit the citizens' lack of knowledge of their right under the FOI law.