The Right of Access to the Information: from the Normative Phase to the Valuation of its Impact
Eduardo Flores-Trejo
Following the enactment of the first Freedom of Information Act in January 2002, Mexico experienced an outburst in the design and adoption of this type of laws at the federal and state levels. Until April 2006, 28 states (of a universe of 32), plus the federation, had already adopted a law on the subject matter with different levels of scope and legislative quality. A similar tendency has occurred in the international arena. Based on studies conducted by the virtual network of Freedominfo.org, currently, more than 60 countries guarantee its citizens "the right to know" about the governmental performance. Surprisingly, while freedom of information was inserted into the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 (see article 19), more than half of those laws were issued only in the last decade.
By drawing on Mexican experience, this document intends to: a) outline the key elements that must be inserted into a Freedom of Information Act to effectively guarantee the protection of this right; and b) present alternative tools to assess the impact of this type of act in regards to good governance components.
This article deals with the subject matters on the basis of three arguments that may be summarized as follows: 1) the Freedom of Information Act is only a means to a goal and not the goal itself; 2) civil society organizations, think tanks and interest groups should endorse the adoption of key elements, recognized by internal standards, in all laws of access to information; and 3) an accurate assessment of a Freedom of Information Act requires extending the set of impact indicators to good governance issues.
This study focuses on addressing the latter argument. Generally, those entities responsible for overseeing compliance with a Freedom of Information Act measure its success against the number of filed information requests. Nevertheless, as this work suggests, a growing number of information requests may only be a reflection of a deficient public information system and not necessarily a sign of greater transparency.
Boletín Reforme N° 397
