“In celebration of Sunshine Week, the National Security Archive’s Mexico Project publishes today a new study of Mexico’s transparency law: FOI in Practice: Measuring the Complexity of Information Requests and Quality of Government Responses in Mexico.
The study represents the first comprehensive analysis of the Mexican freedom of information law: what information requesters have sought and how the government has responded.
The authors analyzed the quality of government responses in relation to the complexity of FOI requests sent through Mexico’s electronic information system from June 12, 2003 to April 30, 2006. After examining 1,000 information requests and corresponding government responses, the authors concluded that in 76% of the cases the government responses satisfied the requests of the user during the first three years of the law’s existence. Nevertheless, the results also demonstrated that the most complex FOI requests were more difficult for public officials to answer, and received satisfactory responses in only 57% of the cases analyzed.
The findings serve as a warning about Mexico’s need to improve the capacity of government agencies to respond to more complex requests for information as requesters become increasingly sophisticated in their demands over time.”