Once an access to information law has been passed, NGO work on the issue can generally be divided into five categories:

• Promotion
• Assistance
• Training
• Monitoring
• Using the law

Promotion

NGOs and other civil society organisations can promote access to information by making the public aware of the existence of the law and the rights that it creates.

They can tell the public how and where to find information.

Here is an example of how an NGO in Bulgaria did this:

The Access to Information Programme (AIP), which led the campaign for the Access to Public Information Act (APIA), is a key agent in promoting the effective implementation of freedom of information. AIP has published a handbook for citizens, which explains the basic concept and principles of the law and the process for making an information request. The handbook includes a template of a model information request. (See Mendel, 2003)

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Assistance

There is clearly an overlap between telling the public about their information rights and helping them to exercise them.

NGOs have a very important role in providing guidance for requesters. This can include telling them which body is likely to hold the information that they want, providing them with copies of the request forms and helping them to complete the forms. If a request is refused, it would also include helping requesters with filing an appeal.

Here is an example from Jamaica of how an NGO has done this:

A civil society organisation has set up a help point to raise awareness about the law and provide advice for those wishing to make an information request. As well as providing practical help to potential requesters in filling out applications for information, the help point will also track, monitor and oversee the implementation of the law on behalf of civil society.

Any information obtained via the help point will also be used to lobby for any changes that may be needed when the act comes up for automatic review, two years after implementation has begun. (See Mendel, 2003)

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Training

NGOs can play a very important role in training information officers and other officials to understand the access to information law. They can also help them to develop and follow procedures in information management and responding to requests.

ARTICLE 19 has done this, for example, in Central and Eastern Europe, in collaboration with national NGOs. They have trained information officers and other public officials to be trainers who can spread this expertise throughout their organisations. They have also produced a manual to train public officials to process information requests.

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Monitoring

If a country has a good access to information law, this law will make provision for an information commissioner, or someone similar, to monitor its effective implementation.

But whether or not there is official monitoring built into the law, NGOs that have been promoting the law, advising users and using it themselves are very well placed to know what is working well - and what is not.

Just as NGOs will come together to campaign for the law in the first place, so they can pool their experience of different issues to see whether access to information is working and benefiting those who are supposed to benefit.

A very good example of this kind of initiative is the report published by the Open Society Institute in 2004 on the implementation of access to information laws in five countries: Armenia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Peru, South Africa.

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Using the law

It is important not to forget that an NGO can use the access to information law to gather information about issues of concern. This can be done either through material that public bodies will now be obliged to publish, or by filing information requests.

In some countries, organisations have grown up whose central role is to file information requests. The best known of these is the National Security Archive in Washington DC. This is a non-governmental organisation, attached to George Washington University, which has compiled massive amounts of information on US government policy through using the Freedom of Information Act.

Click below to see an example of the National Security Archive's work. It is a page on its website dealing with the genocide in Rwanda:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB117/index.htm