The Rising Tide: Freedom of Information in Southeast Europe

On March 20–22, a regional meeting on freedom of information took place in Zagreb, bringing together Croatian political figures and activists with experts from throughout Europe. One objective of the meeting was to secure support for a Croatian freedom of information law and to discuss how such a law might look, given the recent wave of initiatives throughout southeast Europe. Another was for nongovernmental organizations working on freedom of information from countries with freedom of information laws to share their experiences with nongovernmental organizations from countries in southeast Europe which have yet to secure such laws. The conference also gave participants from new and prospective NATO member countries the opportunity to discuss the limits of state secrecy in the context of national security.

Access to information—in particular government-held information—is, as one participant put it, "the oxygen in which a democracy breathes." Freedom of information laws provide an essential means of engagement for all those directly or indirectly affected by government policy. In countries with a culture of free information, these laws have empowered individuals and organizations, in particular marginalized groups-minorities and migrants-to participate in government and/or ensure accountability. Freedom of information is central to transparency and crucial to successful anticorruption initiatives.

But, freedom of information is not just good policy, it is also—as numerous speakers in Zagreb noted—a human right. The right to "seek, receive and impart information" is set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Article 19 of both). Increasingly it is inscribed in national constitutions. "Public information is our property," a Romanian participant said. "It is created using our money by civil servants paid with our money. To have access to information [...] is simply to activate the right to something that is already ours." Croatian Minister of Science and Technology Gvozden Flego agreed: "At the root of democracy is the idea that the people, regardless of how we define them, have supreme power-and have the right to know who is taking what decisions on their behalf."

The tide of transparency is rising in Europe. Thirteen countries of central and eastern Europe have adopted freedom of information laws since 1989. Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia all passed legislation recently, in part as a result of significant agitation by nongovernmental organizations. The latest law, Slovenia's, entered into force on March 22, 2003, while the Zagreb seminar was underway. The particular significance of this achievement in former communist countries should not be underestimated. Authoritarian regimes breed entrenched cultures of misinformation and mistrust. As one participant put it, official secrecy "has proven to be one of the harshest legacies of the totalitarian past and the most difficult to surmount." More than a decade after transition, another noted, "we are still societies thirsty for information."

High-level political support for a Croatian freedom of information law was a first objective of the meeting. A second was an exchange of views and strategies among nongovernmental organization activists from countries with freedom of information laws and those without. A third aim was to provide an outline of existing international freedom of information standards, including by representatives of the London-based nongovernmental organization Article 19 and the Council of Europe. Lastly, the tangled issue of national security and information access was opened for debate through interventions from Privacy International and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

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