The Daily Star,\u00a0 December 15, 2020<\/p>\n
Shamsul Bari and Ruhi Naz<\/p>\n
Most countries of the world have moved in the past 50 years from the age-old practice of government secrecy towards making their work largely accessible by the public through Right to Information (RTI) or Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation. Despite this slow revolution, secrecy in government work remains a deeply entrenched tradition. Even in more mature democracies, governments remain ever ready to limit the operation of the law whenever possible. We saw this during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
This resistance is not difficult to understand. Governments do not like that their shortcomings or wrongdoings are discovered by citizens. RTI\/FOI acts are instruments to make that possible. They arose from citizens’ rights movements, to the growth of consumerism, to distrust of the bureaucracy, to the struggle for press freedom, etc. They gave rise to public pressure on governments to adopt the law. Read More.<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Daily Star,\u00a0 December 15, 2020 Shamsul Bari and Ruhi Naz Most countries of the world have moved in the past 50 years from the age-old practice of government secrecy towards making their work largely accessible by the public through Right to Information (RTI) or Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation. Despite this slow revolution, secrecy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rti-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rib-rtibangladesh.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rib-rtibangladesh.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rib-rtibangladesh.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rib-rtibangladesh.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rib-rtibangladesh.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=364"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/rib-rtibangladesh.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":369,"href":"https:\/\/rib-rtibangladesh.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions\/369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rib-rtibangladesh.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rib-rtibangladesh.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rib-rtibangladesh.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}