Re: What would a model Freedom of Information Act Look Like

From: S Moonesamy <sm+mu_at_elandsys.com>
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 2015 08:10:24 -0800

Hi Ajay,

Thanks for the feedback.

At 14:35 11-12-2015, Ajay R Ramjatan wrote:
>Thanks for the report. In my opinion FOI can fall under the Ministry
>of Good Governance. FOI requests are to be handled by officers who
>are trained to handle FOI requests and are fully conversant with the
>FOIA as a full-time job with a newly-created job title. The
>requirement for justification for an FOI request can become a
>barrier if officers are allowed to have their own interpretation of
>what is a justified request and what is not.

I suggested to my group not to decide about justification as the
group would evenly split on the topic. The last part of the workshop
was about using a FOI law. There were three presentations where the
transport expert (used an as an example) was supposed to be
confrontational towards a newly arrived Information Officer. The
first two presentations highlighted the difficulty for a requester to
get a useful answer about road repairs.

>I do not know whether its more efficient if each Ministry has its
>own FOI counter or whether there should be one dedicated FOI bureau
>with several staff members to process FOI requests and liaise with
>the relevant Ministries and other public bodies to obtain the
>required information.

Part of the group was in favour of each ministry having its own
Freedom of Information Unit and the rest of the group was in favour
of requests being processed through the main office.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy
Received on Sat Dec 12 2015 - 16:20:12 PST

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