Designing Right to Information Laws for Effective Implementation
This paper looks at the relationship between the design of a law which aims to give individuals a right to access information held by public authorities, i.e. a right to information (RTI) law, and the successful implementation of that law. The lega...
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2015
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2015/08/24869620/designing-right-information-laws-effective-implementation http://hdl.handle.net/10986/22507 |
| Summary: | This paper looks at the relationship
between the design of a law which aims to give individuals a
right to access information held by public authorities, i.e.
a right to information (RTI) law, and the successful
implementation of that law. The legal framework involves
both laws and subordinate legislation, such as regulations,
which complement the law and are easier to amend, with the
result that there is likely to be a more dynamic
relationship between the design of regulations and
implementation challenges. There is also, of course, the
question of how laws are interpreted by the courts, as well
as other players, such as oversight bodies, which can impact
significantly on implementation of the law. A key issue for
this paper is the fact that there is, at least in many
countries, a law-implementation or policy-practice gap in
the sense that implementation of the RTI law is
significantly sub-optimal.1 No law is perfectly implemented,
but the gap between the standards of the formal rules and
what actually happens is often quite significant for RTI
laws. In some settings where observance of the rule of law
is low, RTI laws are almost entirely ignored and/or certain
key provisions in them are routinely ignored. This sort of
radical policy-practice gap makes it difficult to discuss
sensibly the relationship between legal design features and
implementation, which is the focus of this paper. The paper
therefore focuses on contexts where there is a reasonable
expectation or an established record of medium to better
practice in terms of implementation. A key focus is to
discuss ways to reduce the policy-practice gap through more
carefully tailored legal design. |
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