Human Rights and Communications Surveillance: Access, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Privacy International are leading a new initiative focused on disseminating new international principles around human rights and communications surveillance.”Called the International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance, approximately 100 NGOs from around the world have already shown support and many of them will be conducting their own campaigns to provide further exposure. See announcement of Aug. 19 event in Washington.
Transparency and Development: A series of blog posts by Courtney Tolmie examines issues in transparency and development, with specific reference to FOI in blog 3. Blogs 1 through 3 highlight findings from a series of interviews with CSOs that engage in transparency and accountability work. The posts present lessons from these interviews, focusing on how organizations explicitly or implicitly form their theories of change for ensuring transparency, accountability, and better services and spending. Blog 4 presents thoughts about how researchers can identify strong CSO design and implementation partners for rigorous evaluations of transparency and accountability – and how CSOs can conduct their own cost-benefit analysis of whether working on an evaluation is a good fit for them. The Transparency for Development (T4D) Program is a rigorous five-year, multi-country research and outreach program on the impact of community-led transparency and accountability initiatives on health and other social sector outcomes. (See previous FreedomInfo.org report.)
Model OGP: “Model Open Government Partnership is a replication of Open Government Partnership meetings and operations. It is the first simulation in its kind, arguably the first in the world – given OGP’s very recent establishment, and fully organized by Open Government Indonesia (OGI) Secretariat. OGI Secretariat, as the organizer, aims to introduce youth, in Indonesia and beyond, to the intent and purpose of open government initiative in general, while introducing a new game-changing business of international cooperation. It is part of our mission to let youth understand the significance of and get engaged in Open Government as they will be the next generations to take over the government in the future.”
United States: “A look at 907 requests completed by MuckRock users found only about 42 percent of federal Freedom of Information Act requests are completed on time and 27 percent are still without response the first three months. Many state and local agencies aren’t much better, although varying in the amount of time they are expected to respond. For example, Massachusetts has ten days to respond while New York has five.” Muckrock also reported, “The good news is the size of the document does not effect (sic) the amount of time it takes.”
European Union: Dirk Voorhoof of Ghent University writes in Media Report about the June 13, 2013, decision in the case of Youth Initiative for Human Rights v. Serbia by the European Court of Human Rights. (See previous FreedomInfo.org report.)
Australia: Queensland Attorney General Jarrod Bleijie has released an issues papers in connection with the statutory review of the Right to Information Act and the Information Privacy Act. Comments are due by Nov. 15.
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