Council of Europe Convention on Access to Official Documents

The Council of Europe has adopted a Convention on Access to Official Documents. Cause to celebrate for the worldwide FoI movement, you'd think, but no. The Convention has been criticised for having been developed in secret, with little or no public access to the text in crucial final stages of development. The text of the Convention is also severely lacking, according to NGOs as well as to the Council of Europe's own Parliamentary Assembly who called for a redraft to broaden the scope of authorities covered, impose time limits on the handling of requests, and strengthen the nature of the review processes available to people whose access requests have been denied.

On the bright side, this is still the first international treaty to establish an unequivocal right to access documents held by public bodies, subject to fairly limited exceptions. Exceptions must be precisely laid down in law, be necessary in a democratic society and must be proportionate to the protection of

1. national security, defence and international relations;
2. public safety;
3. the prevention, investigation and prosecution of criminal activities;
4. disciplinary investigations;
5. inspection, control and supervision by public authorities;
6. privacy and other legitimate private interests;
7. commercial and other economic interests;
8. the economic, monetary and exchange rate policies of the state;
9. the equality of parties in court proceedings and the effective administration of Justice;
10. environment; or
11. the deliberations within or between public authorities concerning the examination of a matter.

This is as strong a statement of the right to access as you'll get anywhere(although there's an unfortunate and very silly add-on exception for States with royal families who they feel a need to exempt from the right of access altogether) and the Convention is of value for that reason alone. Time will tell how it will be implemented and whether States will focus on its strengths rather its weaknesses - but the NGO community must not neglect the Convention's strong points.

Council of Europe recommends guidelines to ISPs

The Council of Europe's Steering Committee on the Media and new Communication Services has adopted a new set of guidelines "to assist Internet Service Providers in their practical understanding of, and compliance with, key human rights and fundamental freedoms in the Information Society, in particular with regard to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights."

European media committee votes against new enforcement mechanism for freedom of expression

From the minutes of a recent meeting of the Council of Europe's Steering Committee on the Media and new Communication Services:

"4. Possible future mechanism for promoting respect of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights: In response to the Committee of Minister´s request following the Parliamentary Assembly Recommendations 1783(2007) on threats to the lives and freedom of expression for journalists and 1791(2007) on the state of human rights and democracy in Europe, the CDMC pursued consideration of this subject on the basis of a Bureau report on the state of discussions. While recognising that problems exist as regards respect for Article 10 of the Convention in member states, a tour de table during which 30 CDMC delegations took the floor, showed a majority of 14 to 12 against the establishment of a new monitoring mechanism. The CDMC therefore decided to ask the Committee of Ministers for further instructions on the subject."

This is a real shame - it likely means that this innovative and needed idea is dead. The idea had been to establish a kind of a rapid response mechanism to function alongside the Court - not to usurp the role of the latter, but to be able to provide a speedy response and dispute settlement where needed.