Puerto Rico: Amendments to Access to Information Unfortunate

The Centre for Law and Democracy (CLD) today released its analysis of proposed amendments to Puerto Rico’s Access to Information Act, in the form of Senate Bill 63. Rather than improving the legal environment for access to information in Puerto Rico, the amendments would reduce the score of Puerto Rico from 73 to 69 points out of a possible total of 150 on CLD’s respected RTI Rating, dropping it from the equivalent of 94^th to 106^th position globally out of the 140 countries with right to information laws.

“Puerto Rico already has a very weak legal framework for guaranteeing the right to access information held by government, despite having a constitutional guarantee for this,” said Toby Mendel, Executive Director of CLD. “Instead of weakening it further, the government should undertake a comprehensive review with the aim of significantly improving the legislation.”

The proposed changes which result in points losses on the RTI Rating all relate to requesting procedures, and are specifically the following issues:

• Additional, unnecessary information required when making a request.
• Additional barriers to lodging a request in the form of being required to lodge it with the head of the public authority while also needing to copy the information officer.
• The removal of any requirement to provide access to information in the format preferred by the requester.
• Changes to the regime for extending the time limit to respond to requests which would allow for up to 20 additional days, without any conditions (in addition to extending the original time limit from 10 to 20 days).

Other unfortunate changes include extending secrecy to cover any information which has been classified and the removal of a requirement for information officers to remove personal information when reporting on requests.

CLD’s analysis is available here and the Bill is available in Spanish here and in an informal English translation here. The bolded text represents proposed removals and the text in italics proposed additions.

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