Southeast Asia: Transparency International reports that “rampant corruption across Southeast Asia threatens to derail plans for greater economic integration,” and makes more transparency one of the necessary reforms. “Three key areas have presented themselves in ongoing consultations as both vital and underdeveloped in terms of transparency and citizen engagement in Southeast Asia: 1) whistleblower protection laws; 2) asset declaration; and 3) access to information laws. Among ASEAN countries, only Indonesia and Thailand have a FOI law, “and even in these countries public awareness remains low and implementation could be improved,” according to the report. “Three additional FOI laws are at different stages of development in Cambodia, the Philippines and Vietnam, but have not yet been enacted.”
Media: “Conditions for the media deteriorated sharply in 2014 to reach their lowest point in more than 10 years, as journalists around the world encountered more restrictions from governments, militants, criminals, and media owners,” according to Freedom of the Press 2015, released by Freedom House.
United States: The FOIA Project issues a report on FOIA requests it filed. “Now 65 business days after the FOIA requests were sent to the 21 agencies, only those seven have furnished complete and usable records in response. Several others have made good-faith efforts to comply and appear to working toward providing data. Ten agencies have either failed to respond at all, have become unresponsive at some point in the process, or, in the case of the CIA, have outright denied the request. Among those who have failed to comply: The Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy, the federal entity that, according to its own website, is “responsible for encouraging agency compliance with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).”
Transparency Theory: “Transparency in Search of a Theory” is the title of a new paper by US University of Florida law professor, Mark Fenster, in the European Journal of Social Theory. The abstract states:
Transparency’s importance as an administrative norm seems self-evident. Prevailing ideals of political theory stipulate that the more visible government is, the more democratic, accountable, and legitimate it appears. The disclosure of state information consistently disappoints, however: there is never enough of it, while it often seems not to produce a truer democracy, a more accountable state, better policies, and a more contented populace. This gap between theory and practice suggests that the theoretical assumptions that provide the basis for transparency are wrong. This article argues that transparency is best understood as a theory of communication that excessively simplifies and thus is blind to the complexities of the contemporary state, government information, and the public. Taking them fully into account, the article argues, should lead us to question the state’s ability to control information, which in turn should make us question not only the improbability of the state making itself visible, but also the improbability of the state keeping itself secret.
Art: See the winners of the TransparentArte Contest, an initiative promoted by FAVA CHILE 2013 in conjunction with the Council for Transparency. (In Spanish with photos.)
United States: More lawsuits are filed in Washington over access to federal records than in any district court in the country, according to a review of court filings by The National Law Journal.
Resource Transparency: The Natural Resource Governance Institute posts a series of short, illustrated overviews of key topics in NRGI’s portfolio of work. One is on Transparency Mechanisms and Movements.
Budget Transparency: A Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency Budget Transparency report on “What can international actors do to incentivize budget transparency that increases government accountability?”
United States: FOIA requests by the Mattachine Society of Washington uncovered historical documents of government discrimination against homosexual employees, the Washington Post reports.
Cayman Islands: “A review of Freedom of Information processes may be incumbent upon local FOI managers, many of whom appear to be less-than-versed in what the law requires or the limits it may place on compliance,” according to an article in the Cayman Compass.
Korea: The Korean government and the World Bank issue a report by Seongjun Kim, currently Director-General for research at the Audit and Inspection Research Institute (AIRI), describing the handling of audit requests from the citizens. The Board of Audit and Inspection of Korea makes all audit reports available to the citizenry through its website.
United States: The Associated Press reports on its top 10 stories that involved FOIA requests:
– Federal Aviation Administration officials and St Louis County police tried to keep news helicopters away from sometimes violent unrest following the shooting of a teenager, Michael Brown, by a police officer.
– At least 786 children died of abuse or neglect in the United States in a six-year span while they or their families had open cases with child protection agencies.
– Details of dozens of deaths at Rikers Island jail in New York — such as an inmate “basically baking to death” — that prompted lawsuits to speed up the pace of reforms.
– Thousands of people who received government aid after Superstorm Sandy may be forced to give some or all of that money back, nearly two years after the disaster.
– The federal government’s shutdown of the nation’s already crowded immigration courts meant that37,000 hearings had been postponed, and not just for a few weeks.
– Nearly 400 nursing homes in 39 states, licensed to house more than 52,000 vulnerable people, hadn’t installed enough sprinklers to meet a federal mandate.
– Under the Affordable Care Act, roughly 20 percent of contracts held by Covered California, the state’s health insurance exchange, had been awarded on a no-bid basisand contracts worth millions of dollars had been granted without competitive bidding to friends and former associates of the agency’s executive director.
– A special group of 4,000 companies, farms and others had unmonitored access to California’s dwindling water supplies and were under no obligation to conserve, even amid the severe drought.
– More than 3,200 Iowa government license plates tied to local, state and federal agencies carry a designation that exempts them from tickets stemming from traffic cameras in the state.
– The U.S. government paid nearly $505,000 for travel and luxury hotels for a politically connected consultant who oversaw a failed $217 million U.S.-backed Africa power deal marred by complaints of sexual abuse, injuries and environmental damage.
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