The State Environmental Inspectorate has, with no explanation whatsoever, stopped publishing its weekly oversight reports. Until March 2026, any citizen could see where inspections were being carried out, which entities were being checked, and whether violations were found. Now - silence. The initiative "Stop for Usje" is demanding an answer: who made the decision and on what grounds.

The inspectorate's answer is technically accurate but fundamentally problematic: the weekly reports were not a legal obligation, so they stopped publishing them. In other words - since the law doesn't force us to, we won't do it. The transparency that was until recently a voluntary habit vanished the moment it stopped being a duty.

Citizens must now file formal requests for information and wait up to 20 days for data that used to be published every week. And that's the exact opposite of what the European twinning project for increasing transparency requires - a project the state itself takes part in.

The irony is complete: in that very same March, the environment minister announced the creation of a public Polluters' Registry - a promise of more openness - while the inspectorate was quietly abolishing the only publicly available information on who is checked and when. One hand promises a registry, the other deletes the reports. And between the two hands stands the citizen of Skopje, who every winter counts time in days with clean air - and now will have to dig up even that on their own.