Latest Features
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24 July 2014
The In ‘t Veld Ruling: Raising the Bar for Denying Access to EU Documents
By Helen Darbishire and Pamela Bartlett Quintanilla The authors — Darbishire, Executive Director, and Quintanilla, Researcher and Campaigner, at Access Info Europe — analyze the wider consequences of the recent European Court of Justice ruling (See previous FreedomInfo.org report). The July 3, 2014, pro-transparency ruling by the European Court of Justice in the legal battle for access to negotiations […]
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23 July 2014
Will Aquino Deliver on Vow to Pass FOI?
By Nepomuceno Malaluan This article was first published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on July 22 and it reprinted with permission Malaluan is co-convenor of the Right to Know, Right Now! Coalition, a network of more than 100 organizations from different sectors that is at the forefront of the campaign for the passage of an FOI Act. He […]
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23 July 2014
The Next Step for Nigerian FOIA: Compliance/Enforcement Stupid!*
By Oluwasegun Obebe The Records, Information & Privacy Officer with the Department of Corrections, Washington, D.C., Obebe previously wrote an article for FreedomInfo.org about the Nigerian FOI law in August 2013. Obebe argues against automatic application of the federal law to the states. FreedomInfo.org has written about a trend toward such application in the courts […]
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18 July 2014
Audit Indicates Weaknesses in Some Brazil Jurisdictions
By Gregory Michener Dr. Gregory Michener is Associate Professor of Public Administration and Politics at the Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration, Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro (EBAPE/FGV). He also directs the incipient Transparency Audit Network based at the FGV Rio de Janeiro’s School of Law and EBAPE. This article appeared on the Open Government […]
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18 July 2014
Connecticut Court Wrongly Reduces Access to Information
By James H. Smith This article was first run July 15 in the Journal Inquirer and other Connecticut newspapers. Smith, a retired newspaper editor, is president of the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information. For more not the ruling see article in The Day. Why would seven judges decide that the police can keep information about crime […]
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7 July 2014
Irish FOI Proposals Still`Timid’
By Richard Dowling The following commentary is from RTÉ News. Rowling is the RTÉ North East Correspondent. The decision of the Government to do a U-turn on the issue of upfront fees for FOI requests has been widely welcomed. It is a small but important step forward in making FOI more accessible to the citizens of Ireland. […]
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7 July 2014
Freeing the US Freedom of Information Act
By Nate Jones This article first appeared in the Detroit News July 3. Jones is the FOIA Coordinator for the National Security Archive. Earlier this year, the Veterans Affairs Administration denied the Tampa Tribune’s Freedom of Information Act request for the names of VA hospitals where veterans died because of delays in medical screenings. To […]
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1 July 2014
When Open Data Isn’t Enough
By Júlia Keser? This article was published July 1 on the Sunlight Foundation blog. Keser? is Sunlight’s International Policy Manager. As part of our thinking about how open data relates to government transparency, we at Sunlight have been writing and speaking a lot about why we think open data by itself does not automatically produce the transparency that allows us to […]
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1 July 2014
Germany Failing on RTI in Five States
By Walter Keim The following is the text of a letter sent June 27 by RTI activist Keim to Frank La Rue, UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression 5 German states fail to respect human right of access to information, found for 84% of the worlds population. EU, CoE, OSCE and […]
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13 June 2014
The diminution of RTI Act in Kashmir into ‘Right to Deny Information’ Act
By Irfan Mehraj Mehraj is a staff writer for Authint Mail, where this article was published June 10. Faizan Hassan Khan is a young engineer whose search for truth has led him nowhere. For the last nine years, he has been fighting a lone battle against the University of Kashmir to know the circumstances that […]
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6 June 2014
UK ICO Calls Future FOI Funding Critical
By Mathew Burgess Burgess is a UK digital journalist, freelancer and is writing a book on the Freedom of Information Act for journalists. This post appeared June 6 on his blog, FOIA Directory. He can be found tweeting @mattburgess1. The future of funding for Freedom of Information in the UK has reached a ‘critical’ level, […]
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5 June 2014
Public Private Partnership Project documents becoming public in India
By Venkatesh Nayak Nayak is Programme Coordinator of the Access to Information Programme at the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative The National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) has taken the progressive step of uploading concession agreements and progress reports about the Pubic Private Partnership projects (PPPs) under its jurisdiction through the Internet. The links to project […]
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30 May 2014
Model FOIA Regulations Being Drafted in United States
By Lauren Harper This article was published in Unredacted, a blog of the National Security archive, with which FreedomInfo.org is affiliated. Harper is an NSA staff member. The National Security Archive has partnered with our colleagues at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), to publish a set […]
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30 May 2014
Mexican Court Orders Release of Documents on Massacre Investigations
By Michael Evans and Jesse Franzblau Evans and Franzblau work at the National Security Archive. This report first appeared May 29 in Migration Declassified. Can the Mexican government continue to hide evidence from the public about grave human rights atrocities? A pair of access to information cases now moving through the Mexican justice system may put […]
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9 May 2014
Using FOIA to Get Evidence on Bribe Takers
By Ignacio A. Boulin Victoria The author is Professor of Public Law at Universidad Nacional de Cuyo (Argentina) and co-founder of the human rights group CLADH. His article first appeared May 5 on the Global Anticorruption Blog. In a recent post, Richard Messick observed–correctly–that although in the last 10-15 years we have seen greater enforcement by […]
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9 May 2014
Access to information: Key to development
By Annie Game Game is Executive Director of IFEX. This article was posted May 1, World Press Freedom Day, on the IFEX blog and is available in: Français Español ???? When residents of Bangladesh’s Khulna municipality along the Rupsha River began noticing a spike in health problems in their community, they turned to community leader […]
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2 May 2014
US Must Publish FOIA Releases Online
By Lauren Harper This article was first published on the National Security Archive blog Unredacted. Harper is an Archive staff member. The US was the first country to enact a modern Freedom of Information Act, and was the model other countries looked towards when crafting their own FOI laws. Now, however, the US lags behind the […]
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29 April 2014
Going for a World Record in India
By Venkatesh Nayak Nayak is Coordinator, Access to Information Programme, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative. Last year when the Central Government threatened to amend the Right to Information Act, 2005 (RTI Act) to keep all political parties out of its ambit completely, many of you joined a nationwide signature campaigns to oppose the move. Thankfully, this […]
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28 April 2014
State Secrets Laws Inhibit Open Data
By Travis Korte Korte is a research analyst at the Center for Data Innovation specializing in data science applications and open data. This article appeared April 25 in the CDI blog. Follow him on Twitter @traviskorte. In the United States and much of Western Europe, government data, such as economic indicators, government budgets, and agricultural information, […]
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25 April 2014
Freedom of Information: The World of Hurt
By Simon McGarr This post was published April 20 on the website of McGarr Solicitors, located in Dublin, Ireland. McGarr’s twitter account is @tupp_ed. Gavin Sheridan has an in today’s Sunday Independent, debunking all the arguments advanced for our State’s insistence on charging an upfront fee for making a Freedom of Information request. You should […]