Maintaining Human Rights During Health Emergencies: Brief on Standards Regarding the Right to Information
Centre for Law and Democracy (CLD) (2020), iii, 24 pp.
"• General public health emergency legislation should not allocate broad discretion to public authorities to limit the right to information through subordinate legal rules but should, instead, subject this to a requirement that any restriction is either “necessity” or “strictly required by the exigencies of the situation”, and is also quite clear regarding how the right to information is being limited.
• No blanket suspensions of the right to information, including blanket time limit extensions for responding to requests for information, should be imposed during emergencies. Instead, emergency provisions should establish the conditions for extending time limits on a case-by-case basis in response to individual requests.
• No limits should be imposed on requests for information related to the emergency and government responses to it, especially where the purpose of the request is to disseminate this information to the public. Better practice is to prioritise these requests, for example by responding more quickly than the law requires.
• Any limits on the right to information should be reviewed regularly and limited in duration to the period during which emergency conditions justify them.
• During a health emergency, necessary changes to the way in which information is recorded and stored should be introduced to ensure that there is no loss of continuity in the recording of government decisions and actions.
• Where an emergency continues for more than the short term, any limits to the right to information that were introduced early on should be lifted or downgraded as soon as possible." (Executive summary, page iii)
• No blanket suspensions of the right to information, including blanket time limit extensions for responding to requests for information, should be imposed during emergencies. Instead, emergency provisions should establish the conditions for extending time limits on a case-by-case basis in response to individual requests.
• No limits should be imposed on requests for information related to the emergency and government responses to it, especially where the purpose of the request is to disseminate this information to the public. Better practice is to prioritise these requests, for example by responding more quickly than the law requires.
• Any limits on the right to information should be reviewed regularly and limited in duration to the period during which emergency conditions justify them.
• During a health emergency, necessary changes to the way in which information is recorded and stored should be introduced to ensure that there is no loss of continuity in the recording of government decisions and actions.
• Where an emergency continues for more than the short term, any limits to the right to information that were introduced early on should be lifted or downgraded as soon as possible." (Executive summary, page iii)
