Les Editions IMODEV (Institut du Monde et du Développement pour la Bonne Gouvernance Publique)
Not a member yet
177 research outputs found
Sort by
Le Renouveau du droit à l’information à l’ère du numérique : entre obligation de publication de l’administration et affirmation du droit d’accès du citoyen
Get PDFL’accès à l’information est l’un des enjeux majeurs de la société contemporaine. C’est l’une des clés de l’évolution du droit et des systèmes économiques tant aux plans national que mondial. C’est, en d’autres termes, l’une des manifestations d’envergure de la globalisation.L’avènement de la société de l’information met l’accent sur l’omniprésence de l’information à différents niveaux, mais il serait excessif de considérer que l’information ne jouait pas déjà par le passé un rôle essentiel dans le fonctionnement de la société. En revanche, l’irruption de la société de l’information a eu un impact considérable dans l’échange d’informations en créant un effet démultiplicateur en la matière. Avec le numérique, la circulation de l’information connaît une véritable révolution tant par sa rapidité ou son caractère quasi instantané que par sa quantité et sa diversité. En ce domaine, les nouvelles technologies ont donc joué un rôle propulseur. L’échange d’informations étant consubstantiel au numérique, il apparaît aisément que la société de l’information est aussi une société numérique. La société numérique doit donc favoriser la circulation de l’information pour être optimale.
When the Curtain Must Be Drawn – American Experience with Proceedings Involving Information That, for Reasons of National Security, Cannot Be Disclosed
Get PDFSpeaking about counter-terrorism in France today is a fraught subject, given the recent awful events that so dramatically illustrated the tensions between our precious liberties, and the steps that might be required to protect them. The impact of terrorism on liberty is, however, my subject. The Twenty-first Century’s wars against terror, like the Red Scare and Cold War of the Twentieth, have repeatedly put pressure on procedural values ordinarily observed in American adjudications. In criminal, civil, or administrative proceedings, tribunals may be faced with the government’s wish to rely on evidence that, for reasons of national security, cannot be disclosed to the private parties concerned in the matter. There may even be circumstances in which the government is unwilling to reveal to the tribunal itself information about the source of a fact proposition it wishes to assert – for example, the identity of a secret agent who has provided it or the manner in which an intercepted communication has been obtained. Similarly, the government may wish to resist a private demand for information, that ordinarily it would be obliged to supply, because it is a state secret – and, again, it may be unwilling to disclose the information even to the tribunal alone, as might be thought necessary to permit assessing the accuracy of its claim
E-Rulemaking’s Democratic Transformation: Anticipated, Actual, and Potential
Get PDFNotice-and-comment rulemaking is often held out as the purest example of participatory democracy in actual American governance. K.C. Davis called notice-and-comment rulemaking the “most democratic of procedures” because all may participate. Regulators are required to accept comments from any interested person and consider and respond to them before making a final decision. Direct public engagement has been seen as an antidote to the democracy deficit that plagues policymaking by unelected bureaucrats. Central to this conception is a belief that the comment process will involve a meaningful exchange of views. In the words of the DC Circuit, notice and comment involves “an exchange of views, information, and criticism between interested persons and the agency.” Indeed, it is this broad participation and exchange that is seen as legitimating the resulting regulations.Of course, the reality has always fallen far short of these ideals. Many anticipated that electronic rulemaking would enable more democratic rulemaking, finally allowing effective and broad public participation. This has not in fact happened. This paper reviews the course of e-rulemaking in the United States and offers some suggestions for how it might be restructured in a more limited, but more meaningful, democratic way
Accountability or participation? Disentangling the rationales for FOI access to deliberative material
Get PDF[extract] This conference described our age as “the open government era”. The optimism apparent in this title is in many ways entirely justifiable. While open government has evolved slowly, and faced many challenges, half a century of statutory rights to access government documents has converged with information technology revolution to produce some remarkable results. When the United States Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1966, the idea of free online datasets, open to anyone anywhere in the world with access to a hand-held device, would have been unimaginable. When the Australian Federal freedom of information legislation was passed in 1982, leaks of government information like those now being disclosed over the Internet through Wikileaks were being printed in newspapers and monographs. The Hon. Michael Kirby, former Justice of the Australian High Court, once described the introduction of freedom of information (FOI) as a radical reform, given the long history of official secrecy, and “the attitudinal shift that FOI legislation demanded of ministers, departments, agencies and the public service [as] nothing short of revolutionary”.led the Federal Government to obtain High Court injunctions on the grounds of Crown copyright
Free Speech, Transparency, and Democratic Government: an American Perspective
Get PDFGovernmental openness and accountability are essential to the proper functioning of a democratic society. At one point in history, monarchy was the dominant form of government in Europe, and some monarchies tried to justify their existence through the concept of “Divine Right,” the idea that kings were placed on their thrones by God, were divinely inspired and guided, and were carrying out God’s will through their actions. Of course, to the extent that monarchs really were carrying out God’s will, concepts like openness, transparency and democratic accountability had no role. After all, why would society allow common people to criticize what God has done, or allow them to rebuke the monarch for carrying out God’s choices and actions
The Informational Ombudsman: Fixing Open Government by Institutional Design
Get PDF[extract] The ombudsman has gradually emerged in the U.S. as a key tool among the various legal doctrines, institutions, and technologies used to reveal the government to the public. After the ombudsman’s initial development and implementation in northern Europe, several prominent administrative law scholars brought the institution to American policymakers and academics’ attention in the 1960s and 1970s during the initial wave of elite liberal disaffection with the regulatory state. Proponents during this initial period viewed the ombudsman as an independent entity within the administrative state that could, at least in theory, close the increasing distance between the bureaucracy and public. In its adaptation to the specific administrative task of open government law compliance and reform, the ombudsman has offered an institutional fix to the revealed deficiencies from which the legal rights approach to “freedom of information” suffers: the bureaucratic tendency to avoid complying with openness obligations and the expense and delays attendant to judicial review.This paper describes the ombudsman’s role in supporting the open government mandates of U.S. state and the U.S. federal governments, and fits it into a framework for understanding transparency that I have developed in earlier articles. I characterize the ombudsman as an institutional transparency fix, one that follows other such fixes—including most prominently the creation of legal rights to government information—in attempting to address the bureaucratic tendency to hoard information. Each fix, including the ombudsman, proceeds from prevailing assumptions about the best means to reveal the state, both reflecting and furthering historically-situated conceptions of government and its reform. Like the other fixes of the past fifty years, the ombudsman has made marginal gains in reforming open government laws and bureaucratic compliance with them. But it has not and it cannot make the state fully transparent or sufficiently transparent for open government advocates, for reasons I will discuss
Financial Transparency of Local Governments in Eastern EU Countries
Get PDF[extract] The dynamic political and economic processes existing in Eastern EU countries in recent decades have resulted in significantly increased attention to transparency and accountability issues in the public sector, particularly in regard to financial issues. Citizens, taxpayers, donors, lenders, the EU and other supranational institutions have been interested in obtaining high-quality financial information that will allow them to assess how public funds are being used, as well as the performance of public sector entities. They wish to use this information to hold managers accountable, as well as in their own decision-making processes. According to Chan (2003) “it is not enough to keep the book accurately; the books have to be open to the public. [Government accounting] aims at keeping the citizens informed about the city’s financial position, financial performance and service effort and accomplishment, which is crucial information to determine the affordability and sustainability of service delivery and value for money issues.
Freedom of Information and Open Government in Denmark: Progress or deterioration ?
Get PDF[extract] The purpose of this article is to show how freedom of information and open government have come under pressure in Denmark. Denmark has traditionally been known as a very open society. However, recent developments have challenged Denmark’s commitment to giving the public access to information, as well as its commitment to open government. The questions have arisen because of changed security situation following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, increased EU cooperation since the EU system has traditionally provided less public access to information than the Danish system, and recent amendments to the Danish Public Records Act that limit public access to internal documents that detail or describe political decision-making. Obviously, some of the mentioned challenges are general concerns in many Western democracies
Access to National Security Information under the US Freedom of Information Act
Get PDF[extract] A genuine democracy is incompatible with secrecy. Meaningful citizen participation in policy formation and oversight presupposes access to relevant information. Information is the fulcrum on which every form of accountability turns.In no domain is such access more important than in matters involving “national security” - the government’s responses to perceive external and internal threats to public safety and the territorial integrity of the State. Yet democratic societies typically give executive officials (who have multiple motives to opt for unjustified secrecy) the unilateral power to conceal any information to which they choose to attach the “national security” label. This common practice thus disconnects part of the essential machinery of democracy. In an era of transnational terrorism and ever expanding conceptions of what “national security” means, secrecy’s potential for eroding democratic values is growing, even at a time when societies seek more than ever to promote openness in government
Beware the Unintended Consequences: Government Transparency, Racial Data Collection, and Minority Rights in the United States and Abroad
Get PDF[extract] For several decades, the United States government has encouraged transparency by collecting data that details the nation’s racial and ethnic composition. The stated purpose of this data collection is to identify racial discrimination and create measures to promote equality. Today, most progressive American policymakers, advocates, and scholars see this effort as a necessary and positive tool for combating racial and ethnic discrimination and promoting civil rights. By gathering statistics on the status of racial and ethnic minorities, the federal government is able to track disparities in a host of areas where systemic racial discrimination continues to impede equality, including education, housing, and employment opportunities. The data also serves as a way to track potential discriminatory behaviors in areas like law enforcement and can illuminate racial disparities in arrests, criminal prosecutions, and sentencing. Many European nations, including France, however, have eschewed such data collection for political and cultural reasons as well as concerns regarding privacy and data misuse. This is true despite rising calls from policymakers and academics in EU member states to collect racial and ethnic statistics to address long-standing racial and ethnic inequality. Yet, even in nations like the United States where the government has been relatively transparent in its collection, research, and reporting, racial data collection has had unintended negative consequences of the sort contemplated by the very nations opposed to this form of collection. Understanding these historic and contemporary challenges may help shape how nations collect such sensitive information in the future, and can support government efforts in enforcing civil rights protections through the use of such data