jenniferdebeer

Friday, August 31, 2007

Urgent Action re Council of Europe Treaty on Access to Docs

fyi: FOI = freedom of information

There are sign-up letters for Civil Society, NGOs, and individuals.
See http://www.access-info.org

--
*From:* Helen Darbishire [mailto:helen.darbishire@gmail.com]
*Sent:* Tuesday, August 28, 2007 8:18 PM
*To:* foianet@foiadvocates.net
*Cc:* helen@access-info.org
*Subject:* [foianet] Urgent Action re Council of Europe Treaty on Access
to Docs.
*Importance:* High

Madrid, 28 August 2007

**

*Dear FOI Advocates*

*Access Info Europe*, *Article 19 *and the *Open Society Justice
Initiative *are today launching a campaign to call for the future
European Convention on Access to Official Documents, currently in
preparation by the Council of Europe, to meet international standards
and to ensure adequate protection of the right to information.

*We are urging all FOI Advocates around the world to join the campaign
through a sign-up letter (attached) and other actions (listed below).*

*The problem*: If the current draft of the Convention is adopted it will
become the world’s first treaty to guarantee the right of access to
information but it will fall below prevailing European and international
standards, thereby flying in the face of the enormous progress made in
the past several years. The final drafting session will take place in
Strasbourg during 9-12 October 2007.

The future Convention will establish a right to request “official
documents”, which are broadly defined as all information held by public
authorities, in any form. On the positive side, the Convention will
establish that the right to “official documents” can be exercised by all
persons with no need to demonstrate a particular interest in the
information requested, and at no charge for filing requests and viewing
documents.

However, the draft treaty has a number of serious flaws :

*1. *Failure to include all official documents held by legislative
bodies and judicial authorities within the mandatory scope of the treaty;

*2. *Failure to include official documents held by natural and legal
persons insofar as they perform public functions within the mandatory
scope of the treaty;

*3. *Failure to specify certain basic categories of official
documents, such as those containing financial or procurement
information, that must be published proactively.

*4. *Absence of a guarantee that individuals will have access to an
appeals body which has the power to order public authorities to disclose
official documents.

*5. *Absence of a guarantee that individuals will be able to appeal
against violations of the right of access other than "denial" of a
request (such as unjustified failures to provide access in a timely
fashion or in the form preferred by the requester).

*6. *Lax drafting of exceptions that permit withholding of official
documents under the internal deliberations and commercial interest
exemptions:

*a. *There are no time limits on the application of the internal
deliberations exemption; such documents may be withheld indefinitely,
even after a final decision on the matter has been taken;

*b. *The treaty should protect only “legitimate commercial
interests,” not all and any “commercial interests,” as in the present
draft.

*7. *Absence of a requirement that states set statutory maximum
time-limits within which requests must be processed.

More analysis of these problems can be found in the attached documents.

The final drafting session in Strasbourg starts on 9 October 2007. We
need to take action now to convince governments of the 47 member
states of the Council of Europe to insist on improvements to the draft
Convention before it is finalized. We plan to use International Right to
Know Day, 28 September 2007, to highlight these concerns.

*ACTION: **Attached is a sign up letter to the drafting group**. *We
are aiming for as many signatures as possible from NGOs (civil society
groups) and individuals across Europe and around the world by 28
September. You can sign up by writing to me (helen@access-info.org

or helen.darbishire@gmail.com
), or to the e-mail address
treaty@access-info.org . The deadline for
signing is 17 hrs CET (5 pm) on Wednesday 26^th September, so that we
can release it to the media for coverage on 28th September.

Please encourage other NGOs to sign as well. All human rights and other
civil society groups should care about this issue and are welcome to
sign the letter. Interested individuals can also sign. A copy of the
letter and a sign-up link can be found on the home page of Access Info:
www.access-info.org , along with more
information.

A copy of the draft treaty can be found via a link on the Access Info
home page.

* *

*The attached document gives a list of WHAT YOU CAN DO and these ideas
are copied below. These actions are mainly for people in the 47 Council
of Europe member states, but others are welcome to do whatever they can
to support the campaign: this treaty will have a global relevance!! *

* *

*/Access Info Europe (Helen Darbishire and Eva Moraga) is coordinating
the campaign, liaising with Article 19 (Daniel Simons) and the Justice
Initiative (Sandra Coliver, Darian Pavli and Eszter Filippinyi). Please
contact any of us to discuss what action you can take! Here are some
ideas: /*

* *

• */Contact your representatives in the Parliamentary Assembly of the
Council of Europe/*: Every Council of Europe member state sends
parliamentarians to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
(PACE). If possible, meet with your country’s representatives and call
on them to raise the issue in the next session of the Parliamentary
Assembly in Strasbourg.

The national delegations to the Parliamentary Assembly are listed here
http://assembly.coe.int/ASP/AssemblyList/AL_DelegationsList_E.asp

• */Get the support of other NGOs/*: Translate information about the the
problems with the Convention into your language and distribute it to
other civil society groups: encourage them to sign the letter. This
issue is relevant to human rights groups, environmentalists, consumer
groups, women’s and youth groups … anyone who needs information should
care about this issue!
• */Spread the word/*: Let other interested communities know about the
issue and call on them to take action and disseminate the news:
archivists, librarians, bloggers, and academics (such as in faculties of
communication, law, political science, etc) are among the groups of
people who are likely to care about this issue and help raise concerns.
• */Discuss with Information Commissioners/**/:/* If your country has an
Information Commissioner, let them know about this issue and discuss
what joint actions you might be able to organise, such as a public
debate of the right to information. In other countries it is possible
that Data Protection Commissioners and Human Rights Ombudspersons would
be interested in the issue and ready to participate in public
discussions or talk to members of government.
• */Write to your government/*: Write to your Head of Government
(President or Prime Minister as appropriate) and the Ministers of
Justice and Foreign Affairs and call on them to urge their
representatives at the Council of Europe to take action to press for the
treaty to meet the minimum standards. Get as many national NGOs as
possible to sign the letter to your government.
• */Brief the politicians/*: Try to meet with government representatives
to explain the issues to them – find out what their opinion is and if
they will support the call for a strong treaty.
• */Try for a parliamentary resolution/*: Brief parliamentarians and,
where possible, urge them to adopt a resolution calling for the treaty
to meet minimum standards (declarations of support from political
parties could also be helpful).
• */Brief the media/*: Tell journalists (especially those who write
about access to information) about the problems and get them to write
stories: ask them to ask the government what it is doing to ensure the
treaty meets the highest standards. Let the media know that on September
28, International Right to Know Day, there will be news about how many
groups have signed the NGO letter as well as about actions taking place
all across Europe.
• */Right to Know Day Special Actions/*: On 28 September, in addition to
your regular Right to Know Day activities, take some special action to
promote awareness of the Council of Europe treaty problem. Keep an eye
on the Access Info Europe website for the latest news on what groups are
doing around Europe and how many NGOs have signed the joint letter.

_Countries with representatives on the Groups of Specialists _are
Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway,
Poland, Portugal, Russian Federation, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and United
Kingdom.

_Other countries may participate in the discussions_ – Slovenia was one
such participant in the July 2007 drafting session. Since all 47 Council
of Europe member countries have a representative in Strasbourg, it may
be that your government can send this person (or another appropriate
representative such as the Information Commissioner from your country)
to make a contribution to the final treaty drafting session.

*Need more info? *

If you would like to know more about how the process in Strasbourg works
and to discuss what action to take, please feel free to call us:

Access Info tel: +34 91 743 14 73 and ask for Helen or Eva.

Helen mobile : + 34 667 685 319, or via Skype: helen_darbishire.

_______________
Helen Darbishire
Executive Director
*Access Info Europe*
calle Principe de Anglona 5, 2c
28005 MADRID - Spain
mobile: + 34 667 685 319
helen@access-info.org or
helen.darbishire@gmail.com
Skype: helen_darbishire
www.access-info.org

Labels: access, information, legislation, responses

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

access and having a voice

my sitting down to blog was triggered by reading the following blogpost:

Why Geldof’s image of rotting Africa is ok by me Richard M Kavuma
http://panos.blogs.com/africavox2007/2007/06/why_geldofs_ima.html

the above post is a commentary on the (de)merits of the cover of a BILD Zeitung edited by Bob Geldoff, portraying an emaciated baby with headline: "30, 000 Menschen sterben in Afrika jeden Tag an Armut", roughly "30, 000 people die in Africa every day due to poverty". Kavuma goes on to question, then argue for, Geldof´s use of the image and (inadvertent) perpetuation of a stereotype; juxtaposing bad and good events, but letting the bad news gain the coverspot. well. i pondered in a similar vein recently when having bought the latest issue of Vanity Fair magazine, guest-edited by Bono. Unlike Geldof however, Bono´s aim was to portray the more positive side of the continent, accompanied by lovely portraits by Annie Leibovitz. my wondering in boh examples incorporated thinking about "who gets to tell the story?" a Western voice or one from the global South. and this goes to my general thinking on this topic of late, browsing then shelves of local bookshops; wondering why there could not be a Tony Judt equivalent for a book on Africa.

there is always a tension between painting (or is it sticking to?) the dire picture as opposed to foregrounding the positive. and even when foregrounding the positive, that can be misconstrued somehow.

this reminds me that, and by way of example, someone had once said to me that in one of the chapters for the South African Masters degree that I did, I spoke "too highly" of Stellenbosch University; that in my writings I had come across as someone wanting to stress the superiority of the university (read for that, "superiority above other South African universities") ...that never entered my thinking i must say, simply because my mind doesn´t work like that. my very modest and good-natured aim had been altogether different, in that i was trying to highlight the positive and the long-time presence cf. absence of connectivity in South African universities. so let me explain.

in my study, in the part where i had conducted a structured record review of web sites hosted on the university´s domain (to see if they were making working papers available from departmental homepages), i had an intro which described/chronicled the general development of the "wiring up" of the university in question. in this intro, i had wanted to portray and emphasise the positive side; to indicate that universities in South Africa (not just the one under study) enjoyed connectivity from an early stage. this was some effort to counter the stereotype of a largely digitally-disconnected continent and academic populace. to counter, in effect, this notion of overall backwardness that often characterises opinion re connectivity in Africa. well. my point has always been that academics at higher education institutions in South Africa (bearing in mind that I am speaking only of South Africa here) do have connectivity, and as such, should have been, and should be, further along with self-archiving activity.

i think what we now see however is that scholars all over still display a wide reluctance to self-archive; which i find profoundly unfortunate. whenever i have gotten up to speak about Open Access, i had felt that, given an intelligent and reasonable scholar before me, that the arguments _for_ OA would prove convincing in themselves. that on the basis of thát, people would go on to share their work openly.

instead, what i see is that we get bogged down in some kind of thrust and counter-thrust; tilting at windmills and losing sight (often) of the larger issue of access. yes, doesn´t it come down to that? and access in turn facilitates having a voice. these can happen at two levels, or in two spheres that i want to particularly highlight here.

the one: there can be the need for physical access; yes, just simple hooking-up to the Internet, and thát can facilitate giving people voices, and the platform from which to highlight social or other plights. not to toot the horn of bloggers everywhere, but let´s face it, i´d rather have blogs than not have them, since it means i can gain information from channels other than big media giants.

two asides come to mind from the latter observation.

aside one: some people say that blogs are just self-indulgent fora for ppl with nothing better to do. that, their presence complicates the information landscape, and so, this complexity is held up as some argument proof for not having blogs. logically, the reasoning is flawed of course.

aside two: some people say that self-archiving, and the complexity conjured up by versioning (i.e. not knowing which version of an article is _the_ authoritative version) makes for an argument contra self-archiving. here too the reasoning is flawed.

we should rather be paying attention to how to make the landscape less complex, and find ways of navigating the landscape, rather than saying that the landscape should not, or must not change.

per chance, as i am typing this up, a mail has come in announcing one such effort to orient to the information lanscape. see "An ecological approach to repository and service interactions" wiki

the second: how about access to research literature? just because i cannot fully comprehend a piece because it is way beyond my ken, does not make my having access to the article a useless endeavour. for, the thinking that infuses an article, though unrelated to my study domain, may still prove useful. or. a mere ability to have a look-see at cutting-edge research in domains apparently unrelated to my own, can be useful too. whatever happened to serendipity? that finding of a book in a part of the library you hardly go to, except now the library can grow and not be physically constrained. it seems obvious. some would say even utopian... thing is, i just don´t get why anyone would make a sustained argument for a closed-off library. and maybe, with the thinking that one encounters in domains outside one´s own, one could add one´s voice to scholarly debates in one´s own field in a new way. (the ecology of repositories approach is but one such example. there is a neat raison d´être from the European University Institute in the reasoning given for their workshops on "Questions, Methods and Results in Social Science Research" (QMR)" when they say:

The basic principle underlying QMR is that researchers –both individually and collectively - can greatly benefit by learning what is being developed beyond the confines of their own specific research agendas. Specialization should not be a source of defensive ignorance. But being exposed to –and taking advantage of – multidisciplinary criticism requires that researchers from different disciplines get to know which questions or facts, which methods or theories, which results or open inquiries, are being addressed by colleagues from other disciplines.

to say these things seem so obvious that it nags the brain. well, i am reminded here again, in speaking of "access" and "having a voice", of my attendance of the union debate (see webcasts at the OII, and Tobias´ blogpost done during and after the event)
now, i like Tobias´post overall, but there is a slight discrepancy between reality and reporting, where he says "ok, we are well 2 hours in the debate and so far we haven’t seen any female members voicing an opinion…". when in fact it was that when the floor was opened up for Q & A, a number of women in the audience had raised their hands to speak, but they were continuously and apparently ignored (how else to explain it) by the president of the house. noticing this, i turned to Tobias and said "he´s not giving any woman the forum". then later, JZ in his argument highlighted this very same gender-differentiation aspect. and though he (JZ) had phrased things differently, saying that the Internet provided a forum for liberty, even humanity, and for a spectrum of dissenting voices, which was in stark contrast to the binary yes/no door contraption for the debating venue... (think: a double door, opens in the middle. at the end of the evening, a brass pole is placed vertically, down the middle, and people indicate their vote of for or against the motion, by exiting on the left or right).

further, i would add that,unlike in the physical space of the Oxford Union debate hall, where women that evening had not been given the forum to speak, the Internet, in such circumstances, could facilitate the raising of the voice of those who were previously made to be silent. and that overall, the Internet as such was a means for greater civic participation.

i feel then that a similar argument is to be made for opening up access to research. that those previously made to be silent (researchers who work outside of the global (Western, mainly developed world) scientific agenda) can have a voice and a platform from which to give prominence to their works. but even those "in the centre" can also expose their works beyond some incestuous inner circle.

we know, and experience shows; that the current-and-inherited scientific publication and dissemination system does not facilitate much if any of the latter.

Labels: access, having a voice, open access