Freedom of Information rights around the world
Channel: mySociety
Date: 2015-08-11

In this video, users of the Alaveteli Freedom of Information (FOI) software from around the world explain the FOI laws in their countries.

TRANSCRIPT
0:08 Victoria: We have an FOI law since 2008; basically it says that every information or data that the state's produced belongs to the citizens.

0:22  Marietta: The FOI law in Hungary is quite a progressive one but the problem is that it has been amended in 2013. The FOI requests that are vexatious can be denied by the authority 

0:35 Stephen: The Access to Information law that was passed in Rwanda in 2013 was actually very strong, compared to what I’ve been hearing this morning at AlaveteliCon.

So it requests that people provide information in three days, maximum, and Information Officers can say ‘It’s going to take me a little bit longer than that’ but that only provides another week.

So three days for everyone in the public, two days if you’re a journalist, one day if someone’s life or liberty are at risk.

1:00 Henare: In Australia we're lucky to have quite good FOI laws, but they're disastrously not used and so we created RightToKnow to make people more aware of the FOI rights and hopefully to get them to start making requests, which Australians typically don't do.

So anyone has the right to access information that public authorities hold, and that's in the form of documents. So whilst you can’t ask for information, you can ask for any document that they hold currently.

---

Alaveteli is a an open-source platform for making public freedom of information requests to public bodies.

Alaveteli site practitioners gathered in Madrid in May 2015 for AlaveteliCon - the world's only conference dedicated to online Freedom of Information technologies. The event brought together 47 participants from 23 different countries.

See more resources from AlaveteliCon here: https://www.mysociety.org/projects/freedom-of-information/alaveteli/alavetelicon-2015/

Find out more about Alaveteli software here: www.alaveteli.org