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Legislation in different jurisdictions
Note that Legislationline has translations of various FOI laws. Not Kosovo though!
The World Bank has just published a comparative database of FOI legislation. No Kosovo either!
##United Kingdom
England, Wales and Northern Ireland: Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIR), Freedom of Information Act 2000 Scotland: Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs), Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA).
Authorities must respond 'promptly' but in any case not later than 20 working days from the day the request was received, with some exceptions that we don't bother working around in the code. There are differences between FOISA and FOI, and differences between EIRs and FOISA however these are not significant enough for the code to need changing.
The definition of working days excludes a day that is a Bank Holidays in any part of the UK.
In the software, we also have a concept of "very overdue", which we have set at 40 days for all bodies except schools, which have 60 days.
Are there any jurisdictions with two or more information freedom laws, that have sufficiently substantive differences for this to need to be encoded in software?
In eastern/central Europe, Tony says "I think there are substantial enough differences in some countries when you're asking for Soviet-era secret police files. I suspect there are lots of other cases too, but I don't know yet how important it is that it's not just a matter of making it clear in the request."
Below is the start of a list of possible distinctions by country.
##United Kingdom
England, Wales and Northern Ireland: Environmental Information Regulations 2004 (EIR), Freedom of Information Act 2000 Scotland: Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs), Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA).
In the UK, we have four relevant bits of legislation: EIR/EIRs provide a right of access to environmental data, and FOI provides a right of access to all other kinds of data (excluding personal data). The distinction is not important to the vast majority of our end users. EIR covers more authorities than FOI.
It was only introduced in code for bodies which are subject to EIR only (not FOI), and which are tagged eir_only. The distinction is not meaningful in terms of how the request is handled, only in terms of the copy presented to the user and/or authority (boilerplate text in the email request, for example). To simplify this, we could just let the authority decide under which (if any) legislation they are acting for their own purposes (just a tag).
In short, the distinction in the UK could be dropped altogether, in favour of letting authorities reject something as not being something they are subject to. If we wanted to fully support it, we could model it in the data as a many-to-many relationship between laws and authorities, but wouldn't want to expose this to the end user as a choice, ever
There is no official language in the UK, English is the most widely used language and Welsh and Scottish Gaelic are the two most commonly used languages in official translations.
FOI Act of 2014 abolished upfront charges (€15) for all requests in November 2014 and large numbers of new authorities are coming under the Act during 2015 after N months of warning/prep time. Internal reviews and OIC appeals still carry fees (of €60 and €150), which may (will) result in trigger-happiness for initial denials.
Rules are similar to England and Wales re: lateness. Nothing about EIR requests is chargable, however, as with the old Acts.
The respective laws are called OIA and LGOIMA.
Rowan needed to add in "law" and "category" entities to support his requirements.
There's no substantive differences between the laws other than the name. There may be some quibbling about people not making it explicit what they're requesting the information under, but I'd prefer to assume that will be unlikely.
##Kosovo
New law on Access to Public Documents is applicable from 10th of December 2010. Law on Access to Public Documents in English
- All Public Institutions shall assign unit(s) or officer(s) who will be responsible for receiving and conducting an initial review of applications for access to documents.
- A decision for Requests for documents shall be issued within seven (7) working days, either granting access to the document requested or stating the reasons for total or partial refusal. Public Institution may extend this limit for additional 8 working days if:
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- Information or document needs to be requested outside of the respective Public Institution
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- Within one request several information or documents are requested.
- Public institution which in contradiction with the provisions of this Law, disables, detains or restricts realization of the rights in access to public document and information, shall be fined from five thousand (5.000) to ten thousand (10.000) euros.
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- The responsible person of Public Institution shall be fined with the amount from five hundred (500) to one thousand (1.000) euros.
The official languages in Kosovo are Albanian, Serbian and English.
##Aarhus Convention countries There will be some common elements in legislation relating to requests for environmental information in countries which are parties to the Aarhus Convention on account of Article 4. The list of parties to the Aarhus Convention includes over 40 countries and the European Union itself.
Aarhus sets out a limit of one month for most requests which can be extended to two months for more complex requests but some countries will of course have set shorter time limits in law.
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