Ireland: The information commissioner writes about what happened when fees were raised. “While I expected to find a decline in usage of the Act I did not believe that it would be as immediate or as dramatic in scale as proved to be the case: between the first quarter of 2003 and the first quarter of 2004 the total number of requests fell by over 50%. In addition, I found that requests for non-personal information had fallen by 75% over the same period while requests for a mixture of personal and non-personal had fallen by 20%.
United Kingdom: FOIA defenders continue to organize in reaction to the government moves, the latest being a Ministry of Justice proposal of a £100 charge for appealing to the First-tier Tribunal against an Information Commissioner decision. An oral hearing would cost an additional £500. Appeals are currently free. See Campaign for Freedom of Information summary of the situation and a later of where to find the proposals.
India: “The registrars of the Supreme Court and high courts and the state governments have been asked by the Centre to harmonise rules to ensure uniformity in fee charged by them under Right to Information (RTI) Act,” according to an article in The Business Standard.
India: Central Vigilance Commissioner K.V. Chawdary says government transparency has created conducive environment for foreign investors to invest in India, according to an article in The Hindu.
Pakistan: Commentary in The Nation about the RTI situation in Punjab, saying “citizens mostly fail in getting information they seek from public departments.”
Hungary: The Budapest Business Journal editorializes about changes in the FOI law, saying they “inflict more damage to democracy in Hungary than almost anything this government has done.”
European Union: The European Ombudsman asks the Council of the European Union to respond to allegations made by Access Info Europe and the HEC-NYU EU Public Interest Clinic that it wrongly refused access to information on selection processes used for judges entering the Court of Justice of the European Union, according to a summary by Access Info Europe.
OGP: The OGP announces its search for a new executive director.
United States: Two new and complete collections of information about the changing state rules on disclosure of policy body camera footage. The [Washington] D.C. Open Government Coalition (DCOGC) released a comprehensive report at how each state and 15 of the largest cities are addressing through legislation and policies key issues surrounding implementation of police body cameras. This report is the first to compile a panoply of legislation, policies, regulations and current law into a single, easily accessible and reviewable document. The Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press put similar information in an interactive map format.
United States: News about Hillary Clinton’s emails is too frequent to summarize easily, but in one recent article of note, by Josh Gerstein of Politico reports, “Transparency advocates say the procedures the inspectors general recommended for handling the release of Clinton’s email have the potential to slow to a complete stop the already glacial Freedom of Information Act process.” Byron Tau in a Wall Street Journal blog writes that Clinton’s “use of a personal email server for official purposes has been anything but convenient for the agencies charged with reviewing her emails for public release.” On July 29 “an irritated federal judge” grilled the State Department “on a pattern of delayed document releases that has turned a possible bureaucratic logjam into a major problem for the leading Democratic presidential contender,” according to Politico’s Rachel Bade and another report on the hearing by Michael Macagnone of Law 360.
United States: The Justice Department reports on government-wide FOIA compliance in its annual summary and assessment of departmental reports. DOJ also announced its schedule for “best practices” meetings.
United States: A controversy erupts when The University of Michgan says a radio station it owns can’t file a public records request for campus sexual-assault data, according to an article by Jonathan Peters in Columbia Journalism Review.
Journalism: A review of the rise of fact-checking groups internationally, by Sameer Padania, program officer with the Open Society Program on Independent Journalism.
Filed under: What's New