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is gaining around the world
"The
right to know is gaining around the world" by
Thomas Blanton The International Herald Tribune,
October 11, 2003,
p. 6
Last month (September 23,
2003), Armenia became the 51st country in the world to
guarantee its citizens the right to know what their government
is up to. Armenia's new freedom of information law is
the latest outpost of the worldwide movement towards opening
government files - a movement that took off in the 1990s
and just this year also brought in the world's second
most populous country, India, and one of China's largest
cities, Guangzhou.
The new openness laws vary tremendously, face huge implementation
problems, and often receive only lip service from bureaucrats.
But the trend is producing much more government accountability,
and often dramatic headlines. For example:
Requests under Japan's
2001 access law revealed that the government tried to
limit the geographic definition of areas affected by
"Minamata disease" (mercury poisoning) in
order to reduce compensation payments.
Requests under Mexico's
2002 law are pressuring the government's human rights
commission to address more than 3400 complaints lodged
by citizens, of which only a fraction were resolved
last year, mostly in secret.
A request under the 2001
Delhi state-level Right to Information Act for documents
on a promised sewer (supposedly under construction since
1983) in the Sunder Nagari neighborhood embarrassed
the government into finally completing the project
British journalists waiting
for the 2005 implementation of the U.K.'s new access
law used Sweden's (the oldest in the world, dating from
1766) to obtain letters from Prime Minister Tony Blair
to the Swedish prime minister, after Blair's government
refused to release the documents, citing possible damage
to foreign relations.
South African opposition parties used
the new South Africa access law to open internal government
documents on a controversial oil contract with Nigeria,
all of the benefits from which went to an offshore company
rather than to the South African people. Meanwhile, the
Nigerian parliament is on the verge of passing its own
access law.
Irish reporters used their 1997 freedom
of information law to show collusion among four private
license-holding companies and the government that has
stymied the development of wireless and broadband Internet
access in Ireland.
Israel's freedom of information law compelled
the Yad Vashem memorial council to open its files showing
how it chooses which "righteous gentiles" to
honor on its "Avenue of the Righteous" (non-Jews
who helped Jews during the Holocaust).
The Bulgarian NGO, Access to Information
Programme, used Bulgaria's FOI law to reveal that the
government's minister of science and education had illegally
(and under the table) rented out his agency's lobby to
a private company.
Ironically, civil society and government
reformers around the globe are making this extraordinary
progress at the very time that the United States is backing
away from its previous leadership in open government.
Even before the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the
U.S. Congress had ordered a re-review of the hundreds
of millions of pages declassified under President Clinton
(more than all his predecessors put together), on the
theory that nuclear-related information might be in those
files. At a cost of tens of millions of dollars, this
full employment program for securocrats has actually turned
up mostly obsolete data on former locations of U.S. nuclear
weapons - embarrassing for host governments like Japan's
which deceived their own people on the subject, but hardly
fodder for terrorist bomb-building.
Also before September 11th, the Bush administration
clamped down on presidential records, and covered up the
oil industry's influence in energy policymaking by Vice
President Dick Cheney. After 9/11, Attorney General John
Ashcroft told federal agencies to look for reasons to
withhold information, and President Bush's executive order
on secrecy deleted the Clinton admonition of "when
in doubt, release." No doubt is allowed in today's
White House. While the U.S. Freedom of Information Act
continues its status as the most-used in the world (over
two million requests per year at a cost of about a dollar
per citizen), delays and backlogs are mounting as top
officials throw sand in the gears.
The administration's reflexive secrecy
will be self-defeating. The bipartisan Congressional investigation
of 9/11 concluded that an informed public would be our
country's best weapon against terrorism. After all, the
Unabomber was only caught after newspapers published his
screed and his brother recognized the voice. The right-to-know
fights terrorism, corruption, and repression; and the
world is embracing, while Washington willfully forgets,
the familiar finding by Justice Louis Brandeis: "sunlight
is the best disinfectant."
Thomas S. Blanton is
director of the George Polk Award-winning National
Security Archive at George Washington University in
Washington D.C., and managing editor of the freedominfo.org
web network of international access advocates.
