Freedom of Information Program

The Open Society Justice Initiative promotes freedom of information as integral to an open society, participatory democracy and the promotion and protection of other human rights. The Justice Initiative works closely with other programs in the OSI network and with many national and international NGOs and academic institutions. In all our work we aim to build the capacity of civil society partners and to assist in the development of sustainable national programs for defending and promoting freedom of information. We are currently working on projects in Europe, Africa and Latin America, and are providing technical assistance to projects in China and Indonesia.

GOALS

We have several goals for our FOI work:
- Contribute to the adoption of FOI laws, through provision of strategic guidance to local civil society groups, analysis of draft laws, provision of comparative materials and support for exchange of experiences from countries that have adopted laws.
- Develop strong models for civil society implementation of access to information regimes at the national level.
- Stimulate increased use of access to information laws by targeted sectors of civil society and the general public in selected countries.
- Contribute to the elaboration of strong standards for access to information in specific thematic areas.
- Help civil society groups use the monitoring tool we developed for benchmarking and comparing levels of transparency within and across countries; and use the tool to analyze levels of comparative information access as a basis for advocacy for reform of laws and practices.
- Strengthen regional networks of media freedom activists, and continue to support international networks.
- Contribute to the firmer establishment in international law of the right to information.

MAJOR PROJECTS: 2005-07

The Justice Initiative has actively supported adoption campaigns in several countries, including Argentina, Chile, Croatia, Macedonia, Nigeria and Serbia, and efforts to reform weak laws in many more. We have also worked to increase and promote the full implementation of existing laws. In collaboration with partners in Albania, Argentina, Georgia, Peru, and Romania, the Justice Initiative has worked to gain the release of information on corruption, public health, government contracts, and the salaries of government officials. In Mexico and Peru, the Justice Initiative has joined with partner organizations to provide technical assistance to government bodies, resulting in improved systems for receiving and processing requests from the public.

The Justice Initiative published Transparency & Silence: A Survey of Access to Information Laws and Practices in 14 Countries in English in September 2006, and published a Spanish edition in 2007. The report examines how various countries did—or did not—honor the right to access information. The report analyzed over 1,900 requests for information and found that countries with access to information laws performed better than those with no law or with administrative provisions instead of a law. Transparency & Silence also documented the prevalence of government failure to provide information: 47 percent of requests received no response, with Chile, Ghana and South Africa performing especially poorly. The report highlighted widespread inequality in the provision of information: requestors from ethnic minorities and other marginalized groups (such as Roma) consistently received less information than other requestors, even though their requests were identical. The study also documented the important role that nongovernmental groups play in promoting access to information as a right: governments are most responsive where groups are most active.

The research behind the Justice Initiative’s Transparency & Silence report was cited in one of the most important court cases in the history of the FOI movement. In October 2006, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights broke new ground in declaring that the American Convention on Human Rights gives rise to a general right of access to government-held information. The court's pioneering ruling in the case of Marcel Claude Reyes and Others v. Chile established that countries must train public officials on procedures for releasing information and that they must be guided by the principle of "maximum disclosure," meaning that, with few exceptions, all government-held information must be made accessible. The Justice Initiative helped bring the Claude Reyes case to the Inter-American Court and filed an amicus curiae brief together with other NGOs.

The Justice Initiative is now working with in-country partners to use the court’s ruling to encourage governments in Latin America to pass strong FOI laws and to implement fully those already on the books. The Government of Chile is expected to pass a law by March 2008. Click here for the December 2007 draft of the law in Spanish.

The Justice Initiative has also filed amicus briefs in national courts – with substantial assistance from pro bono law firms - on comparative and international law in order to support cases brought by our partners. Chile’s new Constitutional Tribunal accepted arguments we and our Chilean partners made urging that the public interest should be considered when evaluating a claim of commercial secrets involving government contracts. Click here for our press release, the Tribunal’s decision, and our brief. We filed a brief to Peru’s Constitutional Tribunal urging the Tribunal to rule unconstitutional a regulation that denies public access to most information contained in asset declarations (including about the assets and income of spouses and dependents) that high ranking officials are required to submit.

The Justice Initiative has been working, with Access Info Europe and Article 19 to help draft a robust FOI treaty for adoption by Council of Europe member states. Once adopted, the treaty will be the first multilateral treaty in the world guaranteeing the right of access to government-held information. We have been part of an active coalition that is calling on governments to support standards that reflect the prevailing law and practices throughout Europe today. The campaign accomplished its first goal: the Council’s Steering Committee on Human Rights comprised of representatives of all member states decided to undertake its own substantive review of the concerns raised by the NGO-coalition. Click here for more information about the draft treaty and the NGO campaign.

In 2006, the Justice Initiative commenced a project in eight countries—Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Mexico, Moldova, Peru, Spain, and the UK—to monitor information about government contracts, especially in the oil, gas and construction sectors. The project aims to expose the information governments refuse to disclose that is necessary to monitor corruption. For instance, a UK journalist, by filing FOI requests, was able to expose inappropriate receipt of gifts by top officials of the Olympic Development Agency tasked with awarding contracts for the 2012 Olympics. Click here for more information.

The Justice Initiative has helped develop resources for FOI activists, information commissioners, academics, and government officials. The Justice Initiative helped launch www.freedominfo.org, which has become the leading website on freedom of information; the FOI Advocates Network, a global network of over 90 member organizations in 50 countries that runs a listserv on access to information issues; and the Africa FOI Center, based at Media Rights Agenda in Lagos.

The Justice Initiative has embarked on a project, with Access Info Europe and other partners, to develop a wiki (a website that readers will be able to edit) on the Right to Information: Best Law and Practice. The wiki will present and analyze case law and experience from a broad range of jurisdictions, organized by topic, that promote the right of access to information held by governments and by bodies that perform public functions or receive substantial government funding. Its great virtue is that a large network of users from dozens of countries will be able to add to, correct and comment on the material posted. The initial version will be in English, and we will consider translating all or parts of the wiki into various languages, depending on demand. The wiki has three broad objectives: (1) to enable ATI advocates around the world to share with each other (a) persuasive legal precedents and (b) experiences in promoting adoption of legislation; (2) to promote the development of jurisprudence – at the national and regional levels - that advances the right to access information to the maximum extent possible; and (3) to promote the adoption of well-drafted access to information laws, as well as to contribute to the reform of existing laws. Click here for a partial first draft of the wiki.

The Justice Initiative has embarked on a project to explore how FOI requests and related litigation in Europe can be used to shed light on the involvement of European governments in the CIA’s program of extraordinary rendition and pave the way for possible cases to the European Court of Human Rights challenging information denials and complicity in those renditions. We are focusing our work initially in Albania, Macedonia, Poland and Romania. All four countries have freedom of information laws and experienced FOI advocacy/litigation groups that have expressed interest in working with us to pursue these cases. Click here for more information.

DIRECTIONS FOR THE FUTURE

In the coming years, the Justice Initiative will redouble our efforts to promote adoption of FOI laws throughout Africa, and will begin work in parts of Asia and the Middle East. We will continue to support the full implementation of laws that are already on the books especially by supporting litigation. We will also start to work with professors to develop or strengthen clinics on, or that include, the filing and pursuit of FOI requests. We will continue to strengthen the development of norms by working for the best possible treaties, statements of principles and case law at the international and regional levels.

RELATED MATERIALS

* Justice Initiative 10 Principles on the Right to Know.
* Los 10 Principios del Derecho de Saber del Justice Initiative.
* Transparency & Silence: A Survey of Access to Information Laws and Practices in 14 Countries.
* Transparencia y Silencio: Un Estudio de Leyes y Prácticas de Acceso a la Información en 14 países.
* Marcel Claude Reyes and Others v. Chile – Decision in English.
* Marcel Claude Reyes y Otros v. Chile - Sentencia en Español.
* Amicus curiae brief on the Marcel Claude Reyes and Others v. Chile case.
* Council of Europe FOI treaty.
* FOI Advocates Network.

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