China Environmental Law

As you may recall China recently promulgated new “public disclosure” regulations (see here).  The South China Morning Post ran an article yesterday (regrettably a subscription is required to access SCMP content), that reviewed the numbers for Shanghai on the processing of requests for information made by the public in 2008.  These are requests for public information of any kind, not just environmental, but they are interesting nonetheless.  Here’s the breakdown:

With respect to the rejected requests, in 1,000 instances the requested information purportedly did not exist, another 972 were rejected because they had been made to the wrong department, and 502 requests were met with refusals to produce the requested information (in 304 of these cases because of “state secrets”).

Thus, slightly more than a third of the requests achieved a “positive” result.  This would seem a little low, but

Yan Yiming, one of the city’s highest profile lawyers and a campaigner for more transparent government [he made requests for the public release of national budget data earlier this year], said he saw both positives and negatives in the figures.

[H]e said the high number of rejections suggested that government officials were still not fully committed to the concept of openness.  ”Many do not like their work to be criticised by members of the public,” he said. “The high number of refusals due to state secrets is a little suspect. I doubt that many people would really have been asking about state secrets. This reason is often given as a stock excuse for information that is considered slightly sensitive.”

However, he said he was generally optimistic about the development of open government in Shanghai. “I do think, however, that Shanghai is a leader in this field nationally. Other local governments and even the central government ought to learn from their experience.”

If we get any breakdown on requests specifically made to the Environmental Protection Bureau, we’ll let you know.