Romania’s progress is confirmed in a report released earlier this month showing that citizens’ access to government information in Eastern Europe is now equal to that in established democracies. Indeed, the report, Transparency and Silence, conducted by the Open Society Justice Initiative (available at www.justiceinitiative.org), indicates that in some ways the new democracies have something to teach the old: certain government agencies in Romania were more responsive to citizen requests for information than comparable agencies in France and Spain.