These are notes from a recent ‘fireside chat’ held by the ATI Network. For the sake of frank conversation and knowledge exchange, the session was not recorded, but you can read on for the main points.
Laurent and Xavier from the French Alaveteli site MaDada were talking about their learning process from working with Access Info on legal reform of FOI laws in France, as detailed in this post. This is part of the ATI Network project we’re working on across Europe to strengthen ties and skills between European Access to Information platforms.
The work began almost three years ago, when Rachel Hanna, Director of Access Info, and Helen Darbishire, the former Director, mapped all the FOI laws across Europe and organised them with high level recommendations and categorisation against an “ideal” law. From there, Access Info identified four different countries to work in depth with over the lifetime of the project to try and influence changes to laws or steps forward in campaigning.
France, with MaDada as its subject, was one of the countries identified, and there were a number of reasons for this which Laurent explained when we met: “The French context is difficult. The law is old, they tried to do some updating between 2016- 2018 with the internet in mind, but other than that it’s not changed since 1978.” However, one thing that has gained consensus from all politicians and lawmakers is that there is “constitutional value” to FOI in France, which is positive.
Laurent explained how Access Info dissected the law and broke it down into really distinct parts, separating which worked and which didn’t: “It was an interesting thing to see it dissected from the outside and get that perspective.”
They already knew that the law wasn’t a strong one, but viewing it through the eyes of people who work on improving these things really brought home how much work there is to do. For example, France did not sign the Tromso convention, despite being one of the key negotiators of the convention!
The law itself was revealed to be quite partial — there are a large amount of exclusions which are absolute, and no balance of interest is considered for release of information (like the public interest tests we have in the UK, etc). This is backwards compared to most of Europe. They do have an oversight body called the CADA, but apparently that body is weak both in resource and power.
Then, when it comes to implementation, this is even weaker than the law itself. And to compound this, barely anyone knows about the existence of the law either.
So, looking at Access Info’s three tenets of advocacy, lobbying and activism, MaDada set about defining what would be possible for them to work on.
Quickly, they realised that lobbying would be challenging. Right now France is in some political turmoil due to the dissolution of the parliament and subsequent failure of governments — they’re expecting another vote later this year, and this instability really puts a blocker in the way of discussing legal reform with politicians and getting legal change pushed through.
For the activism side of things, you need the movement behind you, and if not many people are aware of the law it’s hard to get together to campaign for this.
So advocacy was the route MaDada chose: promoting the law and increasing access. They had a slight chicken and egg issue with it. They desperately needed to find allies, but to find them, they needed to talk about FOI, and sell the law, which is tough when the implementation is so broken. They started down the training route and completed training with journalists which was positive, but also brought the realisation that this is a long-term endeavour.
They also tried publishing a report — which was met with silence. It’s disappointing but for the team it also felt expected, so they’re looking at the easy low hanging fruit for their next steps.
They came into this process with quite high expectations. They wanted to change something, propose new legislation or make a visible immediate difference, but actually going through the process they have realised that this is a long journey and they’ve taken the first step in a series of continuous action. Now their goal is to look back years from now and say “in 2025 we said this, and look at us now”. The first battle was won in 1789, with the drafting of the constitution, and it’s taken 200 years for it to become law, so MaDada have got to take a long view and set milestones which they can achieve and look back at and say how they’ve got there.
What are the key takeaways from working with Access Info?
A long view is needed, the law will never be “perfect” and will never get there immediately but small milestones and steps are the way to go. Also, you can really break this down and organise it like an engineering problem.
The transnational view was so helpful: they hadn’t realised how much it would be, but it’s good to have the feeling of “we’re in this together”. Finally, they made a list of what documents you can actually request in France and even they were surprised by how many it was!
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Image: Mathias Reding
