Analysis of the Access to Information Bill 2019, The Gambia, July 2019

The Centre for Law and Democracy has done a quick assessment of the ATI Bill based on the RTI Rating, an internationally recognised methodology for assessing the strength of the legal framework for RTI.2 According to this rapid assessment, the ATI Bill would earn 116 points out of a possible maximum of 150, putting it in 16th position globally out of the 124 RTI laws currently assessed on the RTI. [...] The table below shows the breakdown of the scores of the ATI Bill according to the seven main categories of the RTI Rating. [...] ➢ Consideration should be given to adding a reference to the wider benefits of the right to information law and to requiring the law to be interpreted in the manner which best gives effect to those benefits. [...] While this is useful, better practice is to limit fees to the costs of reproducing the information and sending it to the requester (with the possible exception of the fee provided for in section 22(3), relating to the cost of transcription). [...] This includes an obligation to 19 inform the requester that the information is not held and to 2 2 16 refer the requester to another institution or to transfer the request where the public authority knows where the information is held.