European Treaty on Access to Information

For some years now, since 1998 in fact, the Council of Europe has been talking about agreeing a treaty or other international document on freedom of information - the right of every person to have access to information held by or on behalf of the state. This is an important issue for two reasons: first, because access to information is crucial to democracy and key to enforcing other human rights, and second, because unlike the other major global and regional human rights treaties, the European Convention on Human Rights does not confer a right of access to information.

The early efforts culminated in a Recommendation on Access to Official Documents, adopted in 2002, which is pretty good in terms of substance but which is unfortunately not binding in law. The Council's "Group of Specialists on Access to Official Information", or DH-S-AC in bureacracy-speak, has therefore continued work on putting a treaty together and they are now in fact pretty close to agreeing something. Unfortunately it looks like it'll be a watered-down version of the 2002 Recommendation, which is a shame, and the provisional draft so far has been much criticised by the three civil society groups that have observer status on the Group of Specialists. Criticism of the latest draft of the treaty - which itself has not been made public, as far as I can ascertain - by ARTICLE 19 and others can be found here; an earlier civil society letter criticising the draft treaty can be found here.

No word yet on when the treaty might be ready for consideration by States - the draft is now at the 'expert group' level, and needs to go through at least one further layer of bureaucracy before it'd be ready for signature - but it does feel as though they have some momentum going right now. Mid-2007 perhaps?