Freedom of information laws by country detail legislation that gives access by the general public to data held by national governments. They establish a "right-to-know" legal process by which requests may be made for government-held information, to be received freely or at minimal cost, barring standard exceptions. Also variously referred to as open records, or sunshine laws (in the United States), governments are also typically bound by a duty to publish and promote openness. In many countries there are constitutional guarantees for the right of access to information, but usually these are unused if specific support legislation does not exist.
Read more about Freedom Of Information Laws By Country: Introduction, Pending Legislation By Country
Famous quotes containing the words freedom of, freedom, information, laws and/or country:
“The freedom to make a fortune on the Stock Exchange has been made to sound more alluring than freedom of speech.”
—John Mortimer (b. 1923)
“Men who want to support women in our struggle for freedom and justice should understand that it is not terrifically important to us that they learn to cry; it is important to us that they stop the crimes of violence against us.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)
“Rejecting all organs of information ... but my senses, I rid myself of the Pyrrhonisms with which an indulgence in speculations hyperphysical and antiphysical so uselessly occupy and disquiet the mind.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Natural knowledge, seeking to satisfy natural wants, has found the ideas which can alone still spiritual cravings. I say that natural knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the laws of comfort, has been driven to discover those of conduct, and to lay the foundations of a new morality.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one’s native State;Mneither can you seize hold of that, unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)