The
World's Right to Know By
Thomas Blanton
Published
in Foreign Policy, July/August
2002
During
the last decade, 26 countries have enacted new legislation
giving their citizens access to government information.
Why? Because the concept of freedom of information is evolving
from a moral indictment of secrecy to a tool for market
regulation, more efficient government, and economic and
technological growth.
Introduction
History
may well remember the era that spanned the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the collapse of the World Trade Center
as the Decade of Openness. Social movements around the world
seized on the demise of communism and the decay of dictatorships
to demand more open, democratic, responsive governments.
And those governments did respond. Former Russian President
Boris Yeltsin partially opened the Soviet archives. Former
U.S. President Bill Clinton declassified more government
secrets than all his predecessors put together. Truth commissions
on three continents exposed disappearances and genocide.
Prosecutors hounded state terrorists, courts jailed generals,
and the Internet subverted censorship and eroded the monopoly
of state-run media.
Most
striking of all, during that decade, 26 countries-from Japan
to Bulgaria, Ireland to South Africa, and Thailand to Great
Britain-enacted formal statutes guaranteeing their citizens'
right of access to government information. In the first
week after the Japanese access law went into effect in 2001,
citizens filed more than 4,000 requests. More than half
a million Thais utilized the Official Information Act in
its first three years. The U.S. Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) ranks as the most heavily invoked access law in the
world. In 2000, the U.S. federal government received more
than 2 million FOIA requests from citizens, corporations,
and foreigners (the law is open to "any person"),
and it spent about $1 per U.S. citizen ($253 million) to
administer the law. Multilateral institutions are also trying
to meet freedom-of-information challenges from their member
states (as in the European Union (EU), where Sweden, Denmark,
and Finland are criticizing the culture of secrecy favored
by Germany and France) or from civil society (the World
Bank is now fumbling with a half-hearted disclosure policy).
In
the aftermath of September 11, as control of information
emerged as a crucial weapon in the war against terror, troubling
signs emerged that governments might be shutting the door
on the Decade of Openness. But worldwide, new security measures
and censorship laws have been few and far between. Canada
contemplated but then backed away from giving its justice
minister the power to waive its long-standing access law
on an emergency, terrorism-related basis. India passed the
Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance, which threatened jail
terms for journalists who didn't cooperate with law enforcement,
but no such actions have yet occurred. Great Britain delayed
implementing its new information access law until 2005 but
said the delay had nothing to do with September 11.
Ironically,
secrecy has made the most dramatic comeback in the country
that purports to be the most democratic. Even before the
al Qaeda attacks, the Bush administration claimed executive
privilege in several high-profile requests for information,
fighting off congressional calls for the names of private-sector
advisors on energy policy and stalling the release of Reagan-era
documents under the Presidential Records Act. But September
11 turned this tendency into a habit, sometimes justifiably
(as in details of special operations in Afghanistan) but
more often reflexively: In recent months, White House officials
granted former presidents veto power over release of their
administrations' records, ordered agencies to use the most
restrictive and legalistic response possible for FOIA requests,
and denounced leaks even as mayors and local law enforcement
complained about the federal government's failure to share
information. The Bush administration's secrecy obsession
will likely prove self-defeating, because like markets,
governments don't work well in secret. The most effective
opponents of the president's yen for secret military tribunals
were not civil libertarians but career government prosecutors
and military lawyers, who insisted on more open trials and
more due process on legal and constitutional grounds, as
well as for reasons of efficiency. The prosecutors know
what President Bush does not-that openness fights terrorism
by empowering citizens, weeding out the worst policies,
and holding officials accountable (not least the foreign
despots who are now temporary U.S. allies in the war against
terrorism). More broadly, the motivations behind the freedom-of-information
movement in countries outside the United States generally
remain unchanged by the war on terrorism. Openness advocates
are successfully challenging entrenched state and bureaucratic
power by arguing that the public's right to know is not
just a moral imperative; it is also an indispensable tool
for thwarting corruption, waste, and poor governance.
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full article is available below in both English and Spanish
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