Latin America: Read the minutes (English and Spanish) of the VIII International Meeting of the Red de Transparencia y Acceso a la Información Pública (RTA) in Brasilia Nov. 4-5. “The RTA is a collective space that brings together public institutions responsible for overseeing implementation of Transparency and Access to Information Laws in Latin America. This meeting was preceded by two workshops on ‘Indicators’ and on ‘Archives.’ “ The minutes were prepared by staffers of the Council of Transparency of Chile and describe RTA plans and projects.
FOI History: Toby Mendel, Executive Director of the Centre for Law and Democracy, writes on “Right to Information” subtitled “Recent Spread of RTI Legislation,” for the World Bank. The Executive Summary says:
In the last 20 years, there has been a massive growth in the number of national laws giving individuals the right to access information held by public bodies (right to information or RTI laws). The number of countries with such laws has grown from 19 mostly Western democracies in 1995, to some 100 today from all regions of the world. Furthermore, the strength of these laws, as measured by the extent to which they reflect international standards, has increased significantly during this period. Over approximately the same period, RTI has come to be recognized as a human right under international law, a significant normative development.
The main global drivers for these changes include the accessibility of the idea behind RTI, namely that governments hold information not for themselves but on behalf of the wider public, growing demands for participation, globalization and changing relations with information wrought by new information technologies. At the national level, political dynamics also play an important role, along with international pressure and strong civil society campaigns.
Despite these positive developments, challenges remain, including the over one-half of the world’s countries that do not have RTI laws and significant policy-practice or implementation gaps in many countries with such laws.
Transparency Research: The Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency commissioned three case studies and a synthesis report on innovative practices in fiscal participation, transparency, and accountability. Final versions of the three case studies, on South Korea, Brazil, and the Philippines, along with the synthesis report, are available for download (PDFs). The reports were authored in late 2013, with a public comment period in early 2014.
OGP: The OGP releases a database of the 900 commitments made in 48 new action plans, with new and more precise coding categories.
OGP: The Open Government Partnership Steering Committee Nov. 11 issued a statement saying it is “deeply concerned about recent personal attacks on Ms. Vanja Calovic, the Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM) researcher in Montenegro.
Privacy: A new chapter was added to the Open Government Guide – on Privacy and Data Protection, providing for a framework for integrating privacy considerations into open government plans and programs. The guide was first published as a report by the Transparency and Accountability Initiative (T/AI) in 2011 and has been updated as an online resource in 2013.
European Union: Access Info Europe publishes an interview with Vicky Cann, a campaigner for Corporate Europe Observatory, about accessing EU documents.
United Kingdom: Ben Worthy, in his OpenDataStudy blog, examines a proposal in the UK for mailing taxpayers a detailed breakdown of where taxpayer money goes.
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