Malaysia: Analysis of Freedom of Information Bill

12 August 2026

The Centre for Law and Democracy (CLD) is today releasing its analysis of the Malaysian Freedom of Information Bill (FOI Bill), which was tabled in parliament in July 2026. CLD very much welcomes the fact that Malaysia is moving ahead to adopt legislation giving individuals a right to access information held by government, or a right to information (RTI) law. As of today, Malaysia is one of only 54 UN Member States which lacks such legislation. At the same time, our assessment of the FOI Bill shows that it is very weak, earning only the equivalent of 47 out of a possible 150 points on the RTI Rating (29%), putting it in 137^th place from among the 142 countries globally with RTI laws, or well into the bottom ten countries.

“This draft law earns Malaysia a tie for weakest performance among Southeast Asian countries, alongside the Philippines, but the latter is currently substantially upgrading its own legislation in this area” said Toby Mendel, Executive Director of CLD. “We believe that Malaysia can and should do much better than this and we are ready to support parliament to improve the Bill.”

Given the weak score, there are obviously numerous problems with the FOI Bill but some of our more serious criticisms include the following:

• The scope of public authorities which are covered should be significantly enlarged.
• The proactive disclosure obligations are both non-mandatory (public authorities “may” publish this information) and extremely limited, omitting, among many other items, any financial information whatsoever.
• The score for requesting procedures is among the lowest in the world and includes several seriously problematical features such as not only requiring applicants to provide reasons for their requests but also limiting severely the types of reasons which will be accepted as valid.
• The regime of exception scores only 17% due to the fact that it preserves other laws, has a significantly overbroad list of exceptions, many of which do not include harm tests, and lacks any public interest override, sunset clauses or even a severability provision.
• There are almost no promotional measures.

CLD calls on the Malaysian parliament to exercise due diligence in relation to the FOI Bill and to substantially improve it before adopting it into law. Our analysis is available here, our RTI Rating of the law is available here, and the FOI Bill is available here.

For further information, please contact:

Toby Mendel

Executive Director

Centre for Law and Democracy

Email: toby@law-democracy.org

+1 902 431-3686

www.law-democracy.org

X: @law_democracy

BlueSky: @law-democracy.bsky.social

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/centre-for-law-and-democracy