Nordic countries have traditionally been seen as strongholds of transparency due to their long history of freedom of information laws. As readers of this blog may know, Swedish freedom of the press act (1766) is considered the oldest piece of FOI legislation in the world, with Finnish act on government publicity (1951) coming not far behind.
However, a recent article in the leading Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, suggests that the state of FOI in Finland would not be as good as it is commonly assumed. A study group from the department of political science at University of Turku made FOI requests by email to 230 random state authorities, asking salary and bonus details of responding organisation’s highest ranked official. All this information should be disclosed without delay and without any further inquiries about requester’s identity or purpose of requests.
Results are interesting, to say the least. According to the spokesman of the group, professor Matti Wiberg, only fifteen (15) authorities responded properly and without delays, with eight more responding after another request was made. All others (207) either ignored the request completely or gave inadequate responses. Several of the authorities also demanded personal details of requester or asked requester to visit office in person, which they would not have been allowed to do.
What is the moral of the story? Arguably, results of the test underline the importance of FOI watchdogs and education on FOI issues. Since Finnish authorities don’t collect comprehensive statistics on FOI requests (as I was told last year by the registry of Ministry of Justice), responsibility effectively falls to independent journalists and study groups to gather data by themselves. This surely doesn’t make it any easier for academics to conduct research.
Logically, the big question that follows is why? It is tempting to argue that the lack of statisitics derives from the deep tradition of FOI in Finnish society. Document publicity is taken as granted and therefore there wouldn’t be any accurate need for statistics. Recent test proves, however, that the impeccable state of FOI in Finland is far from given.
Without available data on authorities’ responses to FOI requests, officials can’t really be held properly accountable, which arguably undermines the initial purpose of having FOI in the first place. Evidently Finnish officials have been given great freedom and therefore great responsibility to act in accordance with FOI legislation.
However, the old question of who is policing the police is still relevant. It is highly questionable, whether the Parliamentary Ombudsman of Finland has sufficient resources to pay special attention to breaches of FOI act, if 90% of authorities fail to conform to it. Another potential watchdog, Data Protection Ombudsman, for one, concentrates only on data protection issues.
Institutional issues aside, one could also ask what is the point of having comprehensive FOI legislation if individual officials subject to it are either unwilling to work according to it, or – as it’s perhaps more likely – not aware of the obligations it sets for them? Without further education of officials on FOI and comprehensive statistics to feed academics with Finland may face a threat of noticing that their good reputation in governmental transparency is based on rather false grounds.
