Right to Information Guide for Myanmar Introduction: What is the Right to Information1 The core concept behind the right to information is that public authorities do not hold information just for themselves. Instead, they hold it on behalf of the public which, at least in democracies, gives government its mandate and resources. As a result, the public, subject to limited exceptions, has a right to access this information. The right to information is well established under international law. This right has its roots in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR), which was adopted unanimously by all States represented at the UN General Assembly in 1948. Article 19 of the UDHR provides that the right to freedom of opinion and expression includes a right to “seek” and “receive” information and ideas, as well as to impart them. The rights to seek and receive information and ideas were subsequently included in Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), one of two legally binding international covenants elaborated on the basis of the UDHR which was adopted in 1966. In 1999, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression noted that Article 19 of the ICCPR imposes “a positive obligation on states to ensure access to information, particularly with regard to information held by government in all types of storage and retrieval systems”.2 However, the earliest judicial recognition of the right to information as a general human right was in a 2006 case decided by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Claude Reyes v. Chile. In their judgment, the Court interpreted Article 13 of the American Convention on Human Rights, which is similar to Article 19 of the ICCPR, as follows: In relation to the facts of the instant case, the Court finds that, by expressly stipulating the right to “seek” and “receive” “information,” Article 13 of the Convention protects the right of all individuals to request access to State-held information, with the exceptions permitted by the restrictions established in the Convention. Consequently, this article protects the right of the individual to receive such information and the positive obligation of the State to provide it, so that the individual may have access to such information or receive an answer that includes a justification when, for any reason permitted by the Convention, the State is allowed to restrict access to the information in a specific case. The information 1 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Licence. You are free to copy, distribute and display this work and to make derivative works, provided you give credit to Centre for Law and Democracy, do not use this work for commercial purposes and distribute any works derived from this publication under a licence identical to this one. To view a copy of this licence, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/. 2 Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the protection and promotion of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, 29 January 1999, E/CN.4/1999/64, para. 12, https://undocs.org/en/E/CN.4/1999/64. The Centre for Law and Democracy is a non-profit human rights organisation working internationally to provide legal expertise on foundational rights for democracy. 1