The government in Cyprus has produced as draft access to information law, but it needs improvement according to activists.
Access Info Europe, the civil society organization Politeia and other groups in Cyprus recently made recommendations to strengthen the draft law. The comments were presented at a recent public consultation.
The draft law (in Greek) does not recognize access to information as a fundamental right, excludes many public institutions and branches of government, lacks an appeal mechanism through an information and requires requesters to produce identification to make a request, the critics said.
The letter makes 10 recommendations:
– Recognise access to information as a fundamental right.
– Recognise that all the information held in any format by all institutions, are public by nature.
– The law on access to information must include all public institutions and bodies, including the executive, legislation, judiciary, and private bodies carrying out public functions or funded with public funds.
– Remove the requirement to present identification in order to make a request for access to information,
– Ensure that the process for requesting information is free for the public.
– Reduce the number of working days to answer an access to information request to the European average of 15 working days, or lower. ?
– Completely revise and reduce the exceptions of the draft law in order to bring it into line with international standards. ?
– Any Information Commissioner should be independently appointed. Secondly, the Information Commissioner should be empowered to overrule the decisions of public bodies who decide to refuse access to information, and for these decisions to be binding. ?
– The appeals system should include a mechanism for requesters to appeal for free to the Information Commissioner, in addition to eventual recourse to the courts.
In 2011, Access Info Europe published a study on the state of transparency in Cyprus.
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