28/06/2015
The Sunday business post
Gavin Sheridan is the Innovation Director at Storyful.
It was January 2010. Having recently begun experimenting with using the Freedom of Information Act (FOI), and starting a blog – TheStory.ie – to write about things like FOI, data journalism and data visualisation, I was interested in learning more about the right of access to information generally.
Nama and Anglo were also in the news. The recently established Nama had, much to my chagrin, been deliberately left outside the scope of FOI, for what I believed to be spurious reasons put forward by then Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan. But I happened upon the “Access to Information on the Environment (AIE) Regulations 2007” online. I followed the thread back to the European Directive that the Regulations were transposing – Directive 2003/4/EC. This in turn led me to the Aarhus Convention, an international treaty that the European Union (and Ireland) had signed in 1998.
When I came upon the Convention itself, I sat down and read it. I quickly realised it was probably one of the most radical ones I had ever seen. How, I wondered, had so many countries signed up to this treaty? It gave citizens so many rights that I could imagine many politicians quickly regretting having signed it. (…)
But Judge O’Donnell went on to say that in this particular case, it didn’t matter, since the court did indeed have the power to interpret the Regulations as a whole, as opposed to only deciding on the narrow issue of the meaning of “and includes”. He argued that since Nama performed “public administrative functions” per the Directive, and since a late 2013 ruling from Europe called Fish Legal clarified the issue, Nama was indeed subject to AIE Regulations.
“So what?” people ask me.
To that, I say that the Aarhus Convention is probably one of the most radical pieces of law in the world. Ireland ratified it in 2012. It places enormous obligations on Ireland, including timely and not prohibitively expensive judicial processes. It obliges genuine public participation in decision-making, and public authorities such as Nama to proactively disseminate environmental information, answer environmental requests, and make available emissions information, regardless of any commercial sensitivities. For environmental matters, it is far stronger than the FOI Act.
Unusually, it has international oversight – if Ireland is found wanting in its implementation, citizens can complain in writing to the United Nations, and the UN can in turn essentially oblige Ireland to change its ways and bring itself into line with the Convention.
The case was not just about Nama. It was about holding public authorities to account, about getting legal clarity for citizens on which bodies are subject to the law, and seeking to vindicate the rights of citizens to access environmental information from those public bodies. Those are all things worth fighting for.
