Bureau Recommends: Failings of freedom of information laws

During the 11 month study AP asked the European Union and 105 different governments around the world about their FOI laws. In all just 14 countries answered requests in full within their legal deadline. Thirty-eight further countries eventually answered most questions.

The team found that newer democracies proved more responsive than some developed ones. Guatemala, Turkey, India, Mexico and Peru all replied swiftly and fully. One of the advantages that newer democracies have is that their laws could immediately be made appropriate to the digital age.

African countries had the worst response record with 7 out of 10 countries which have passed right-to-know legislation not responding to requests at all.

The team found that only South Africa and Mozambique provided any useful information, while the law in Uganda, which was passed in 2005, was deemed particularly ineffective, with fees of about a week’s wages required to even place a request and one journalist struggling for several years to obtain information.

According to AP the United States, which was the third country to introduce FOI laws back in 1966, tried to direct journalists to websites, and provided only heavily redacted documents. Although the information was eventually provided, AP specified that it is still waiting on a 10-year-old request to the US State Department for information about a now-defunct Greek terror organisation.

More than 120 journalists worked on the study which AP says it hopes will educate both AP journalists and other media organisations that these laws exist, and encourage people to ‘challenge governments to live up to the promise of these laws to provide open information to the public, in the public interest.’

AP has made all the responses public, as well as the methodology of the questioning and a summary of countries’ responses, using DocumentCloud.

To read the story in full click here.