Tbilisi, 26 February 2009 – Transparency International Georgia today called on the United Nations and donors to grant independent observers access to an aid meeting in the capital of Georgia this Friday. United Nations representatives will use this meeting to advise international donors on how best to spend around one billion dollars in aid that were pledged at the donor conference in Brussels last October, but so far have not been allocated to any specific purpose. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has refused requests by TI Georgia to allow the anti-corruption organization and other Georgian watchdog groups to observe proceedings at the meeting. “Discussions about how aid money should be spent should not be conducted behind closed doors,” said Ms Tamuna Karosanidze, Executive Director of Tbilisi-based TI Georgia, “Aid money is public money. Both taxpayers in donor nations and Georgian citizens have a right to know what is being discussed and decided in their name.” OCHA has not explained to TI Georgia why the meeting is to be placed above public scrutiny. TI Georgia called on donors and the United Nations to abide by their commitments made in the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, and during the 2008 High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra, Ghana, where representatives recognized that ‘transparency and accountability are essential elements for development results’. “International donors should not set a bad example for the Georgian government to follow,” Ms Karosanidze concluded. “As the first link in the aid chain, donors must assume the leading role in ensuring that the decisions on these huge sums are made transparently and that these sums are spent accountably, so that the money reaches those most in need.”