Environmental Transparency: The July issue of the European Environmental Law Observatory covers information about the application of the Aarhus Convention on access to information, participation in decision-making and access to justice in environmental matters; provides updates on judgments of the Court of Justice and the General Court; and highlights questions raised in recent doctrinal contributions, hand-picked by the Observatory’s staff from a selection of major legal journals.
Research: “Using FOIL Logs to Guide the Publication of Open Data,” a report by Reinventing Albany, beginning:
It is now easy and inexpensive for government agencies to put public records and data online. New York State and New York City have recognized this, and via “open data” initiatives have published thousands of data sets. Oddly, agencies have often puzzled over what to publish first. They should be listening to FOIL. The public is telling government exactly what “high value” data we want online via Freedom of Information Law requests.
Facebook Pages: From Canada, Aurelian Melinte, draws attention to a new Facebook page concerning access to information in Canada. Melinte pointed to the page, in which he says he has a “vested interest,” on the LinkedIn group called “FOIA Specialists.”
Here are a few other FOI-related Facebook pages:
Wobbing – a largely European-focused “Meeting place for journalists who use freedom of information legislation as a journalistic tool.”
Access Info Europe – A page by the Madrid-based nongovernmental organization,
MENA Facebook: A Facebook page on access to information in the Middle East.
Open Government and Civic Technology – “The global exchange on open government, open data, and civic technology.”
Right to Information Pakistan – By the RTI Pakistan Research Center, “an independent, impartial public opinion research organization based in Lahore, Pakistan.”
Others? Let FreedomInfo.org know.
Commentary: “… transparency can help regulation but cannot replace it …”writes Amitai Etzioni is University Professor at the George Washington University in the current issue of Public Administration Review.
Research: “Making Governmental Transparency a Reality Through Dashboards, “ a report by the International City/County Management Association looking at Edmonton, Alberta, Fort Collins, Col., and Williamsburg, Va.
Morocco: Interview with the coordinator of REMDI – The Moroccan Network for Access to Information – on Atlantic Radio show “Sunday’s Guest” to discuss the limitations of the Access to Information bill adopted by the Cabinet recently (in Arabic):
United States: A post about 11of the most embarrassing government websites.
Strategies: The second note in a six-part series by the Global Partnership for Social Accountability discussing “what it looks like to prepare strategies that harness the local political context and whether we are ready for the challenge, by using data from the first two rounds of GPSA applications.”
Exchange Program: The US Sunlight Foundation has a program “to engage in specialized skills transfer with Sunlight. By hosting a Sunlighter for a couple of weeks, or spending time at our office here in Washington, D.C., exchange organizations and fellows can share best practices on opening data and building effective tools for citizen engagement.” Application.
Fiscal Transparency: The IMF has just published a new Fiscal Transparency Code which replaces the earlier 2007 version. “The new Code sets the standards for the disclosure of information on governments’ financial positions, prospects and risks, and is built around four pillars covering the key elements of fiscal transparency,” according to Public Financial Management blog post
FOI Technology: An interim report from My Society about ongoing research in the impact of websites that help FOI requesters.
Open Data: A report by the Open Society Think Tank Fund on projects in Central and eastern Europe involving “new uses of data for advocacy and target non-traditional stakeholders, to develop challenging and complementary information sets for broader application in the policy sphere, and to use data sets to challenge commonly accepted facts in a given policy field.”
Research: An article, “The Role of a Legislative Code in Ensuring the Effectiveness of the Right of Access to Information in Latin America,” by Ricardo Perlingeiro is on the Social Science Research Network.
Abstract:
From a Latin American comparative perspective, this paper proposes that access to official information, as a fundamental right that can be claimed directly from the Constitution and international conventions, even in the absence of pre-existing (statutory) laws to that purpose, should be guaranteed by independent administrative authorities (quasi-judicial). In the absence of such authorities, the author stresses the importance of a legislative code whose main role would be to reduce the wide leeway (room for interpretation) enjoyed by the public authorities in their decision-making powers and the associated negative effects.
Introduction. (i) Implementation of the right of access to information held by the authorities. (ii) What would be the ideal institutional conditions for an effective procedure of access to information? (iii) To what extent could a legislative code promote the effectiveness of the right to information? (iv) Proposed objectives. 1 Access to information as a fundamental human right. 2 The institutional guarantees in the implementation of the right to access information in the Model Inter-American Law of Access to Public Information. 3 The contribution of codification to the realisation of access to information. 4 Vulnerabilities in the Latin American codes on access to information. Closing considerations.
Research Plans: LIDS Global, a two-year-old network of student groups in several nations affiliated with the Harvard Law and Development Society is planning to explore whether FOI laws in developed countries can be mined to extract information about corrupt “demand-side” officials in other countries that could be used to shame or prosecute them in their home countries. “The rationale here is simple: prosecuting agencies in the United States, for instance, come to possess information in the course of a corruption prosecution that could also be used to clean up government and markets in developing countries. Why not get that information to people who can use it, such as civil society and prosecutors in those developing countries?”
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