TODAY, THE FOIA law in the U.S. has become a model for reformers, and ranks as the most heavily used access law in the world. In 1999, the last year for which complete data is available, the federal government received 1,965,919 FOIA requests from citizens, corporations and foreigners (the law is open to "any person"), and spent almost exactly one dollar per citizen ($286 million) to administer the law. For 2000, the total number of requests has surpassed two million for the first time. In 2001, FOIA requests made headlines across the U.S. with data from the Food and Drug Administration showing dramatic disparities by county and region in the rate of doctors' prescriptions of Ritalin (taken by 3 million children in the U.S.), from the State Department revealing that State's legal adviser considered Peru's policy of shooting down suspect drug planes to be illegal, from the Drug Enforcement Administration calling into question 280 drug convictions because of a crooked professional informant, and from the Department of Energy exposing the contamination of more than 100 federal plants, private factories and colleges with recycled uranium that contained deadly plutonium—among many other stories.⁸

A handful of other countries adopted access laws before the end of the Cold War. The former Swedish territory, Finland, enacted a Swedish-style law in 1951; and after the United States took the plunge, France passed a limited access law in 1978, largely the product of a movement of ideas led by jurists and researchers, rather than a political battle or public scandal.⁹ Scandals relating to police surveillance and to government regulation of industry led to Canada's freedom of information statute, passed in 1982 in concert with a significant privacy law; and Australia and New Zealand passed freedom of information statutes more or less simultaneously in 1982, very much influenced by developments in Canada and the U.S.¹⁰ In Australia, the Labor Party had been in opposition from 1949 to 1972, and therefore lacked any ministerial experience and the concomitant access to official information, yet it still took a decade before the final law was enacted. One Australian senator commented, just before a new government took power in 1983, "If we are going to do anything to reform the Freedom of Information Act, and if we want to, we had better do it in the first fortnight, before the new Government has any secrets to hide."¹¹

In the first fortnight after the end of the Cold War, only Hungary took the opportunity to pass a freedom of information act, in 1992, but that action really marks the beginning of the modern international FOI movement. Administrative reform in other former Communist countries bogged down in the early 1990's with frequent changes in governments and a corrosive debate about purging ("lustrating") former Communists. In Hungary, the relation of privacy and openness was the key controversy. The 1992 law was in part the revenge of the new regime against its Communist predecessors, opening their files and exposing them to accountability. Yet many of the new rulers were in those files as well—not necessarily as dissidents, but as effective non-Communist managers or leaders in prior years. As a result, the 1992 Hungarian law focused primarily on data protection, not access. Perhaps the most powerful motivation in Hungary was the commercial one, influenced by foreign investors especially from Germany, to reach certain standards for corporate data protection congruent with those in Germany and the European Union in general. Fortunately, Hungary's law provided for an ombudsman, the Data Protection and Freedom of Information Commissioner, and the first occupant of that office, Dr. Laszlo Majtenyi, proved to be a capable openness advocate, at one point in 1998 ruling against the Prime Minister and the Interior Minister that a draft agreement with Slovakia on the controversial Danube dam had not been properly classified secret and therefore a newspaper could not be prosecuted for publishing it. Indeed, Dr. Majtenyi seems to have been entirely too energetic for the tastes of the current Hungarian government, which did not renew his six-year term when it expired in June 2001.¹²

A more traditional freedom of information process took place in Ireland leading to the passage of an FOI law in 1997. Scandals in the Irish meatpacking industry and in the administration of a public blood bank authority generated public outrage and political will for freedom of information. But the Irish law as currently administered does not cover most non-personal documents pre-dating 1998, among other weaknesses. The Irish law does provide the Information Commissioner or ombudsman with the authority to investigate any refusals of information. But the commissioner must rely on the power of publicity through reporting, since his recommendations are not binding on the government (in contrast to New Zealand, for example). The Irish law has not repealed the presumption of secrecy established by the Irish Official Secrets Act of 1963, and after the first year of implementation, one legal scholar concluded that the outcome was merely "some freedom of some information."¹³

Some of the most far-reaching changes in society arising from a new freedom of information law have occurred in Thailand, which adopted a FOI law in 1997 as part of a whole new constitutional structure. This was the culmination of a political reform process that began in 1992 with mass demonstrations against a military regime and became even more urgent with the beginning of Thailand's economic crisis in 1997. Interestingly, Thai journalists had mixed feelings about the freedom of information movement, reluctant as they were to give up their privileged access to politicians and to government information. Even without journalists, more than half a million Thais used the Official Information Act in its first three years, and one request in particular changed the entire primary and secondary education system in Thailand. A housewife named Sumalee Limpaovart could not believe that her brilliant daughter had failed the first-grade entrance exam for an elite demonstration school at the state-run Kasetsart University, and requested a copy of the examination scores. After a two and a half year struggle that went all the way to the Supreme Court, the released admission records revealed that the school actually relied not on the scores, but on financial contributions, sponsorships and kinship arrangements for its admission decisions. As a result, test scores are now public, privileged admissions are now prohibited, and Sumalee's case has dramatically raised Thai awareness of their access rights.¹⁴

An even longer campaign than in Thailand was required for Japan to enact a national access law in 1999. Japan had suffered its share of scandals, from the Lockheed bribery case in the 1970's to the bureaucracy's coverup of HIV contamination of the blood supply in the early 1990's. And Japan had the U.S. example, so important ever since the U.S. occupation after World War II in the development of Japanese law, if not actual Japanese behavior. But the key factor was the local information disclosure movement: Some 20 years of press attention and local activism by Japan's relatively small population of private attorneys produced more than 500 freedom of information ordinances at the local and prefecture levels, beginning in 1982 with Kanayama village in Yamagata Prefecture. The attorneys, or "citizen ombudsmen," achieved particular success using local access regulations to expose national scandals, such as the billions of yen spent by government officials on food and beverage expenses while entertaining each other. In one famous 1993 case, in Sendai city (part of greater Tokyo), local records revealed that a party of six officials had consumed 30 bottles of beer, 26 decanters of sake, and 4 bottles of chilled sake, for what one commentator called "a rollicking good time"—at taxpayers' expense.

As a result of revelations like these, between 1995 and 1997 Japan's 47 prefectures cut their food-and-beverage budgets by more than half, saving 12 billion yen (about $100 million at the time). Even more important, the information disclosure movement demonstrated systematic falsification of government accounts and expense reports, exposed the corruption endemic to the Japanese public works and construction industries (a political bribery system that bulwarked 40 years of one-party rule in Japan), and helped create a new political culture in Japan. Not only did Japanese citizens line up in the thousands to file information requests at government offices on April 2, 2001, when the new national law went into effect; but also political candidates were vying to outdo each other in pledges of openness. In fact, the newly-elected governor of Nagano prefecture moved his office from the third floor to the first, encasing it with windows and adopting an open-door policy—the personification of the politics of openness in Japan.¹⁵

At exactly the same time that Japan enacted its access law, the freedom of information wave crested in East and Central Europe. Reassured by the successful model in Hungary, pressured by "open society" NGO's such as those funded by George Soros, and eager to integrate into the European Union and NATO, former Communist countries from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic (to borrow a ringing phrase from an earlier era) engaged the freedom of information debate in the late 1990's; and new laws passed in 1998, 1999 and 2000 in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and even in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2001, the latter at the behest of the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE).¹⁶

Like the end of Communism, the end of apartheid also spurred the access movement. The new Constitution under which Nelson Mandela came to power in 1994 in South Africa included a specific provision in the bill of rights guaranteeing access to state-held information to all South Africans. In many ways, this is the strongest such guarantee in the world (the U.S. Constitution contains such a right only by inferences); yet, because South Africa lacks established administrative procedures, and the judiciary is only beginning to be reformed, the Constitutional right is not yet actual practice. A further complicating factor is literacy, or the lack thereof, among many South Africans, which means the government is accepting oral requests for needed information, and developing ways to render oral responses as well. In January 2000, the parliament passed a formal Access to Information statute, and the government is now in the process of developing administrative regulations to implement the law. In many respects, the South African law is the strongest such statute in the world: its coverage extends beyond government agencies to private corporations if public rights are at stake in the information request, and it includes a "balancing test" that requires weighing the public interest in disclosure against the damage of release for every category of information, even national security.

Only certain categories are covered by a balancing test in the new Freedom of Information Law in Great Britain, enacted in November 2000 after a 20-year struggle. The leading British activist, Maurice Frankel of the Campaign for Freedom of Information, calls the new law "a peculiar lopsided act," with both progressive and regressive features. For example, to withhold information in the areas of national security and law enforcement, the government has to show "prejudice" to those interests and the information commissioner can order release on public interest grounds; yet the security and intelligence services are completely exempted from the act. While ministers can veto release of a wide range of material involved in the "formulation of policy," at the same time the government's attorney-client privilege remains subject to the public interest test. Ironically, the final bill that passed the British Parliament is weaker in many respects than the voluntary measures implemented by the Prime Minister John Major's Tory government. But the Campaign decided it was better to have a weak or lopsided bill on the books than to sink the effort entirely.¹⁷

As in Britain, most of the freedom of information laws in the world today came about not because of any sudden conversions to Enlightenment philosophy, but because of specific conditions of competition for political power—between parliaments and administrations, between ruling and opposition parties, between present and prior regimes, between bribe-takers and muck-rakers. But we are entering a new era, in which international standards and expectations of openness play a more important role than particular local political quarrels. In fact, today we are beginning to see an extraordinary interaction between freedom of information and the globalization phenomenon. The new liberal consensus holds that transparency in governments and markets is essential, not merely to prevent corruption, to prevent globalization from turning into what Russia has now become, robber capitalism, but also to ensure democratic participation, especially by civil society and interest group "stakeholders." A recent University of Maryland dissertation tested multiple variables to explain different rates of economic growth among 78 "democratizing" nations over the past 20 years, and found that "The individual feature that is most reliably significant in predicting prospering democratizers and growth is information access."¹⁸

• Global Trends in Access to Information
  —Thomas S. Blanton

• The Next Challenge: Making Global Institutions More Transparent
  —Walden Bello

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