@article{2017:filho:the_right_,
title = {The Right to Information System in Brazil: Tensions between Transparency and Control of Information},
year = {2017},
note = {Right to Information (RTI) laws are commonly seen as key elements of
participatory democracies because they allow citizens to hold public
officials accountable for their actions. Nevertheless, these laws can
be ambiguous since, while creating transparency provisions, they also
limit their scope, preventing fundamental change in the power balance
between state and civil society. In Brazil, this ambiguity is
reinforced by three mechanisms of control created by the RTI normative
framework: the structure of the procedure of information access, which
attributes decision-making power to high-level political appointees;
the procedural requirements for information requests, whose vagueness
empowers bureaucrats to define their concrete meaning; and the
substantive exceptions to the transparency rule, which create an
asymmetry of power between the citizen requesting information and
state agencies responding to it. My main goal is to analyze the
tensions between control of information and transparency that emerge
from the operation of this normative framework by the two
administrative appellate agencies of Brazil’s executive branch -the
Office of the Comptroller General (Ministério da Transparência e
Controladoria-Geral da União - CGU) and the Interagency Commission of
Information Reassessment (Comissão Mista de Reavaliação de
Informações - CMRI). I argue that the CGU has exerted pressure
towards transparency in several occasions, tensioning the provisions
that allow the withholding of information and thus promoting a
gradual, incremental and nonlinear advancement of transparency. I also
argue that an additional difficulty for the system to promote
transparency is the relative absence of Supreme Court. Had it been
more activated, it could theoretically impose more limits to the power
to withhold information. I conclude by suggesting that progress
towards transparency does not necessarily rest on legal provisions,
but perhaps on the existence of an autonomous and qualified
bureaucracy that functions as a force that occasionally manages to
push the system towards transparency.},
journal = {VRÜ Verfassung und Recht in Übersee},
pages = {412--434},
author = {Filho, Marcio Camargo Cunha},
volume = {50},
number = {4}
}