Freedom of information: a constitutive public good in democratic societies

Abstract

Freedom of information, or in a broader sense, access to public information is a fundamental element of constitutional democracies and rule-of-law societies. It is a strong guarantee of transparent governance of public matters, and its efficient implementation is a precondition to exercising other rights, in particular freedom of expression and participation in democratic decision-making. In the last two and a half centuries in the cultural West every progressive movement, new democratic legal order, profound societal reform or revolution raised the idea of, and demand for, freedom of information. In 1791 the founding fathers of the United States of America included in the core provisions of the First Amendment of the Constitution the prohibition against obstructing the exercise of certain individual freedoms, including freedom of speech and freedom of press—freedoms mutually presupposing access to public information. The French Revolution in the late eighteenth century did not only want to get rid of the privileges (and members) of the aristocracy but also wanted to abolish censorship and secret governing. When building the new world order on the ruins of the Second World War, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, included the right of everyone to seek, receive and impart information and ideas. For the so-called new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe—countries which achieved their independence through various armed and ‘velvet’ revolutions—freedom of information was one of the symbols of abolishing the dictatorial past during the great political changes around 1989. Numerous well-known and less known quotations, declarations and essays show that access to information and its related ideals—freedom of speech, accountability of government, democratic participation in decision-making—have a crucial role in the great moments of history. According to a much quoted maxim by James Madison, the fourth president of the United States (US) and a drafter of the Constitution, ‘A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.’ The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, bom in the heat of the French Revolution, proclaimed that ‘Society has the right of requesting an account from any public agent of its administration’ (Article 15). According to László Majtényi, the first Hungarian Parliamentary Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, in the turbulent period of the great political changes in 19'89 ‘the demand for freedom of information was a central axis around which the world has turned’ (Majtényi et al. 2005, foreword). It is not only at the major historical moments that the ideas of freedom of information (commonly shortened as FOI), transparent governance and the accountability of the state have relevance. The initial euphoria of great social and political changes may fade (Szekely