Sulaymaniyah on September 17, 2021

 The Iraqi Alliance for Transparency in Extractive Industries held a workshop in Sulaymaniyah province/Titanic Hotel.  On explaining the contents of the Civil Society Protocol attached to the Paris 2019 Standard of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and with the active participation of civil society in the provinces of The Kurdistan Region of Iraq, where 34 people (16 females, 18 males) participated in the workshop and engineer Mushtaq Taleb, an expert on the Iraqi Initiative for Transparency in Extractive Industries, gave a lecture on the subject.

Discussions focused on the importance of an active civil society and its roles and specifications in the application of the International Transparency Initiative for the countries applied to it, including Iraq, the responsibilities that civil society should assume to be effective and influential with the rest of the initiative's corporate and government partners, it was also stressed that building the development impact of the initiative among Iraqi society and raising controversy about the nature of the initiative's objectives and its development in accordance with the requirements of the Paris 2019 standard is a responsibility that can only be well implemented through an independent, free, effective and efficient civil society that can speak freely about the importance of implementing the Transparency in Extractive Industries Initiative in Iraq.

The discussions also addressed the need for the regional government to participate in the implementation of the initiative and to apply the principle of transparency in the region's oil export data and the amounts generated by the people in the Kurdistan provinces as a constitutional and legal right for all Iraqis.

Dr. Adnan Bahia / Sulaymaniyah September 17, 2021