In a July 12 ceremony in Washington, D.C., Brazil and the United States outlined a new multilateral initiative, the "Open Government Partnership" (OGP), which aims to find ways to combat corruption and promote transparency, according to a U.S. State Department statement and the newspaper O Globo.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, criticized Brazil's resistance to dealing with its past and the way that state information is being handled, O Estado de S. Paulo reports.
With more than 800 attendees registered, the 6th International Congress for Investigative Journalism held June 30-July 2 and hosted by the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (ABRAJI in Portuguese), was the largest yet. More than half of the participants were journalists from throughout Brazil who came to the conference in São Paulo to help make it one of the country's top such events.
On July 7 and 8, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and Brazil’s Office of the Comptroller General (CGU) will hold a seminar on policies regulating access to public information in Brasília.
Starting this Thursday, June 30, the 6th International Investigative Journalism Congress will be held in São Paulo, organized by the Brazilian Investigative Journalism Association (Abraji in Portuguese).
Some scholars link the presence of a freedom of information law in a county to its level of social and economic development. After all, the first country to pass such a law was Sweden, a nation that charts highly on human development indices. The second was Finland, another place considered among the best in the world to live. The United States was the third country to pass a law guaranteeing access to public information.
The Brazilian government said it will no longer wade into the fight over adding a permanent secrecy provision to the information access law that is pending in Congress, Correio Braziliense and Folha de S. Paulo report. The amendment would allow top-secret documents to remain classified indefinitely.
Press, legal, and human rights groups are united in their opposition to Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s decision to allow permanent secrecy for official documents as part of a pending information access law.
Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute (IFE in Spanish) is considering a bill that would regulate the right of reply during the election campaign period that would effectively require the media to publish for free all of the responses of political parties and candidates who feel aggrieved by a news article, according to El Universal.
On June 14, when Ernesto Che Guevara would have turned 83, his widow, Aleida March, decided to release the previously unpublished journals the Argentine revolutionary wrote about the Cuban revolution, reported UPI. The journals are part of a series of tributes to his journalistic work, in particular his work for the magazine Olive Green, which he founded, according to Prensa Libre.
The Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji in Portuguese) laments the government's change of heart toward a proposed information access law.
After backlash from some government officials, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff has changed her mind about a proposed information access law, and now supports the ability to keep official documents secret forever, reported Terra.