Morocco: The Morrocan Center for the RTI (Cemdi) (Facebook) holds a July 4 a press conference about the draft FOI bill (in French). Abderrahim Foukahi, president of the CEMDI addresses wavering on the issue (three drafts since 2013) and delays (for example, six months between the receipt of the bill in Parliament and the beginning of the review by the parliamentary committee) and secrecy of the preparation of the bill. He stressed the consequences due to a lack of a FOI law.
Iraq: Lack of information is hindering aid efforts, says Ahmed Hassan, director of the Iraqi Health and Social Care Organization. “We have many gaps in access to information about victims of violence, about perpetrators of violence, holding states for account, holding those responsible for any kind of atrocities or genocide or violations of the international humanitarian laws to account,” said Ahmed Hassan, director of the Iraqi Health and Social Care Organization,” she says in an article in Rudaw.
India: “The state of affairs at the Punjab Information Commission is quite bad,” according to a detailed report by Shahzada Irfan Ahmed in The News.
United States: The 50th anniversary of the FOIA and passage of FOIA amendments generated a flurry of articles: reflections, commentary, research and predictions. (Too much on Hillary Clinton’s emails to chronicle, but here’s the FBI Director’s statement.)
– “Can the Freedom of Information Act Be Fixed?” an article in The Atlantic by Andrew Mcgill and Chris Haugh. The recent bill is the necessary predecessor to something far greater, they say. And a little follow-up on the plight of FOIA officials.
– “More needs to be done to fix FOIA,” writes Alfred J. Lechner, Jr. a former U.S. District Judge for the District of New Jersey, and President and CEO of the Cause of Action Institute, a District of Columbia non-profit oversight and transparency law firm.
– “A timeline of FOIA,” an article by Philip Eil in the Columbia Journalism Review.
– “50 years later, Freedom of Information Act still chipping away at government’s secretive culture,” an article in the American Bar Association Journal by David L. Hudson Jr., a regular contributor to the ABA Journal who serves as the ombudsman for the Newseum Institute’s First Amendment Center.
– FOIA’s early years captured in an oral history project by Washington and Lee law professor Mark H. Grunewald. The first phase of the project, which consists of 30 interviews, focuses primarily on legislative and agency staff who played critical leadership roles in the early years of the 1966 Act and the 1974 amendments.
– The Government Accountability Office issued a report on the Department of Labor’s Freedom of Information Act processing. The report (GAO-16-248) is titled “Freedom of Information Act: Department of Labor Can Improve Management of Its Program.”
– “I helped draft the Freedom of Information Act 50 years ago. Here’s what I learned about government secrecy,” a commentary in the Washington Post by Mark P. Schlefer is a retired maritime and shipping lawyer.
– A Boston Magazine article by Philip Eil about the FOIA site Muckrock.
Publication: Information is power and data is the new oil say the authors of the new book Transparency and the open society: Practical lessons for effective policy, by Roger Taylor and Tim Kelsey.
Canada: The Centre for Law and Democracy makes recommendations for FOI reform.
Sri Lanka: Nalaka Gunawardene writes about the challenges ahead following passage of a RTI law.
Scotland: A “mystery shopping” exercise with 70 public authorities covered by FOI is carried out by the Office of the Information Commissioner. The researchers found that, while 94% of public bodies had an online “Guide to Information” to help people access published information:
- Only 41% published adequate information on procurement and contracts
- Only 46% published adequate information on spending and salaries
- 20% of email and 21% of telephone requests for assistance were not responded to.
Mexico: A graphical report (in Spanish) on the Workshop on Mechanisms for Accountability and Civil Society held June 8, 2016 in Mexico City by civil society organizations. The Workshop Final Report, with information from the different presentations and the summary of the collective discussions (in Spanish).
Pakistan: Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif tells the Council of Pakistan Newspaper Editors that the draft of the Right to Information Bill has been prepared and will be tabled soon, The Tribune reports.
Uganda: The African Centre for Media Excellence creates a database of the lengthy Auditor General’s annual report. “To make all the audit issues equally easy to surface, ACME scoured through the 2015 audit reports relating to central government and ‘datafied’ their findings into a spreadsheets. Find the dataset below or download the excel version here.
United States: A federal appeals court says government emails on private accounts can be subject to FOIA, according to Courthouse News.
United States/California: Legislation (A.B. 2880) is amended in the Californian State Senate to remove a clause that would have given state government agencies vast new power to assert copyrights and trademarks over government-created work, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reports.
United States: The White House discloses how many civilians died in drone strikes outside war zones, as reported by Vice News and The New York Times.
Legislative Transparency: The OGP legislative openness working group co-chairs launched the Legislative Openness Data Explorer, a website that compiles global, comparative information on legislative openness practices. To learn more about the site see this blog post.
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