Ethical and Unethical Use of the Right to Information

A right that empowers can also be weaponised. Distinguishing legitimate use from misuse, without letting the fear of misuse become an excuse for refusal.

The legitimate uses

Before examining misuse, an answer should establish what the right has actually achieved, because the misuse argument is frequently deployed to discredit the instrument as a whole.

It exposes diversion. Muster rolls, beneficiary lists, measurement books and payment records allow a citizen to compare what was recorded against what was delivered, which is the basic method of every social audit.

It secures entitlements. A pension, a ration card or a scheme benefit stalled without explanation frequently moves once an application asks, in writing, at what stage the matter rests and who holds it. The information is often incidental; the effect comes from the file becoming visible.

It enforces process. Asking for the criteria applied, the marks awarded or the reasons recorded reveals whether a decision followed the stated basis, and the knowledge that this can be asked disciplines the decision in advance.

It protects rights, by making it possible to establish what happened in matters where an individual would otherwise have only his own account. And it enables participation, since a community can only engage with a project whose details it can obtain.

The misuses, stated honestly

Misuse is real and an answer that denies it will read as partisan. Several patterns recur.

Harassment. Repeated, voluminous requests directed at a particular officer, often following an adverse decision, used to impose cost rather than to obtain information.

Extortion. Requests filed to discover an irregularity and then withdrawn upon payment, which converts an accountability instrument into a private revenue stream and is the most corrosive form of misuse.

Commercial fishing. Requests seeking a competitor’s confidential submissions or the internal evaluation of a tender, using a public right for private advantage.

Volume as obstruction. Requests so broad that compliance would consume an office for weeks, sometimes filed precisely for that effect.

Vendetta and voyeurism. Requests aimed at a person rather than an institution, seeking service records or personal details with no connection to any public activity.

Why misuse is a weak argument for restriction

Having conceded the problem, the analytical move that earns marks is to explain why it does not justify narrowing the right.

Misuse is a small proportion of total requests, while the discretion required to identify it would apply to all of them. Any test permitting an authority to reject a request as frivolous or motivated hands back the discretion the Act removed, and the officer exercising it is frequently the one with an interest in refusal. A provision aimed at the vexatious applicant would be used most often against the inconvenient one.

The Act already addresses much of this without new powers. Exemptions cover commercial confidence and personal information unrelated to public activity, which disposes of the fishing and voyeurism categories. Extortion is a criminal offence and should be prosecuted as one rather than treated as an information-law problem.

What an authority can legitimately do

Several responses are available that do not require weakening the right, and listing them is the constructive half of an answer.

Publish proactively, which removes the routine requests and leaves capacity for the rest. Organise records so retrieval is a matter of minutes rather than days, since much of the burden is disorganisation rather than volume. Answer promptly, because delay generates appeals, reminders and further correspondence that cost more than the original reply.

Where a request is genuinely disproportionate, engage with the applicant to narrow it, which is usually more effective than refusal and is far more defensible on appeal. Apply severability rather than withholding an entire file. And where an applicant is plainly engaged in extortion, report it as the offence it is instead of treating the whole institution of information rights as the problem.

The position to hold, and it is a defensible one in an interview as well as a paper, is that the answer to misuse of a right is enforcement against the misuse, not restriction of the right. Part 4 turns to the wider machinery and to a case in which a PIO is placed under pressure.

The appellate record tells the real story

One practical observation deserves a place in any answer on misuse. The pattern of appeals reveals far more about an authority than the pattern of requests does.

Where a public authority receives many requests and generates few appeals, it is generally answering properly, whatever the volume. Where a modest number of requests generates a high proportion of appeals, the problem lies in how requests are handled rather than in who is filing them. That distinction is available from records every authority already keeps, and it converts an argument conducted in anecdote into one conducted in evidence.

It also disciplines the misuse claim itself. An office complaining of harassment while losing most of its appeals is describing its own refusal practice rather than the applicants.

The cost argument, weighed properly

Authorities frequently object that answering requests diverts staff from service delivery, and Chapter 19 conceded that capacity objections are genuine. The objection deserves a fair hearing and a firm limit.

Fairly: in a small office with a heavy load, a voluminous request does displace real work, and pretending otherwise is unserious. Firmly: a substantial share of that cost is self-inflicted. Records that cannot be retrieved quickly, information that should have been published and was not, and refusals that generate appeals all multiply the workload the authority then complains about.

The honest formulation is that the cost of transparency should be compared not with zero but with the cost of opacity, which includes the diversion, the litigation, the eventual audit and the loss of public confidence when concealment surfaces. On that comparison, disclosure is usually the cheaper course.