One way of fixing the OIA

I've just lodged my fourth complaint to the Ombudsman for deemed refusal of an OIA request by police this year. That brings their total to four for four - every request I have sent them has not been answered within the legal timeframe, even when they extend it to give themselves more time (when they do respond, these complaints usually expand to challenge their grounds for refusal as well). And this is not an unusual experience with this agency (you can also look at FYI to see the litany of delay there).

The Police are the worst of the worst, but there's a general problem with lateness in OIA requests, and a lack of incentive to obey timelines. So how can we fix this? One suggestion is to follow Mexico's example. Article 53 of its Federal Transparency Aand Access To Public Government Information Law provides that:

Lack of response to a request for access within the time limit indicated in Article 44 will be understood as an acceptance of the request, and the agency or entity is still required to provide access to the information within a time period no greater than ten working days, covering all costs generated by the reproduction of the responsive material, except when the Institute determines that the documents in question are classified or confidential.

Or, to put it another way, if they're late, they can't refuse, except on certain highly restricted grounds.

This seems entirely consistent with the OIA's purposes and the principle of availability, that information shall be made available unless there is good reason for withholding it. After all, if you can't find good reason to withhold within the statutory time limit, then it clearly doesn't exist and the information should be released. It would provide a strong incentive for timely decision-making, or for extending complicated requests. As for the danger of incentivising quick refusals, this would simply mean that complaints over lateness would be replaced with substantive ones (and insofar as rushed decisions tend to be bad ones, see them quickly overturned).

Unfortunately, with the government pushing back its OIA review, it doesn't seem like we'll get a chance to push for such a reform any time soon. Unless some MP wishes to put it in a member's bill...?

Open Government: How do we measure progress?

The Open Government partnership is about making government more transparent and responsive. But how do we measure that? There's the obvious way of checking whether governments are meeting their commitments, but that assumes that those commitments actually improve things meaningfully. As a way of addressing this, Mexico has developed an all-of-government Open Government Metric:

What is this metric? It is a quantitative instrument that measures the levels of transparency and citizen participation in over 900 federal and local agencies from the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches.The metric answers the following questions both from the governmental and citizen perspectives: how much do agencies publish useful information to account for their decisions and actions, and how much do they implement mechanisms to include citizen opinions or proposals into public matters. Not only were the legal and institutional frameworks evaluated, but a “secret shopper” technique was used to assess citizens’ ability to influence the public agenda.

The full details and weightings of the metric are here. While it will have its limits, the metric will let Mexico establish a baseline, and it can then track whether its OGP commitments are having any effect.

Meanwhile in New Zealand we're still doing stuff on a per-commitment basis, with no real examination of the impact. Though the Expert Advisory Panel is at least publishing minutes now, which is an improvement on having to extract them using the OIA. Still, rather than leading on this, we seem to be well behind - as usual.

This will go down well

Back in September, Mexican police arrested a group of 43 student teachers who had been travelling to Iguala for a protest against the local government. They handed them over to a local drug gang, who murdered them. Since the massacre, there have been protests across Mexico at the government's inaction and apparent collusion, which saw the Presidential Palace set on fire. Those protests are going to get worse. Because it turns out that the government - which has denied responsibility and pretended ineffectiveness - knew about the whole thing:

Mexican federal authorities had real-time information of an attack on a group of student teachers by corrupt local police, but did nothing to stop the disappearance and probable massacre of 43 people, according to new evidence published by the news magazine Proceso.

Based on leaked government documents, the new allegations are likely to further fuel public anger at the government of the president, Enrique Peña Nieto, which has insisted that federal authorities share no responsibility for the students’ disappearance.

[...]

According to the Proceso account, the C4 [Federal police spies - I/S] informed the head of the federal police unit stationed in Iguala when the students arrived at the city’s bus station at 9.22pm. About 20 minutes later, the C4 reported that gunfire had broken out, Proceso reported – the opening volleys of what turned into several hours of violence.

Anabel Hernández, one of the report’s authors, told MCS Noticias radio station: “When we see that the federal government and the state government were following the students since they left the college in Ayotzinapa, it becomes very difficult to think that everything else that happened was an accident.”

A government which colludes in the murder of its own citizens does not deserve to stand. Those involved need to be arrested and prosecuted for conspiracy to murder. Those who let them do it need to be forced from office. And Mexico should burn until that happens.

More blowback

The latest NSALeaks. First, the NSA spied on France, tapping and recording tens of millions of phone calls a month:

According to the documents retrieved from the NSA database by its ex-analyst, telephone communications of French citizens are intercepted on a massive scale. Le Monde has been able to obtain access to documents which describe the techniques used to violate the secrets or simply the private life of French people. Some elements of information about this espionage have been referred to by Der Speigel and The Guardian, but others are, to date, unpublished.

Amongst the thousands of documents extracted from the NSA by its ex-employee there is a graph which describes the extent of telephone monitoring and tapping (DNR – Dial Number Recognition) carried out in France. It can be seen that over a period of thirty days – from 10 December 2012 to 8 January 2013, 70,3 million recordings of French citizens' telephone data were made by the NSA. This agency has several methods of data collection. According to the elements obtained by Le Monde, when a telephone number is used in France, it activates a signal which automatically triggers the recording of the call. Apparently this surveillance system also picks up SMS messages and their content using key words. Finally, the NSA apparently stores the history of the connections of each target – or the meta-data.

And they hacked the email of Mexican President Felipe Calderon:

Der Spiegel said in May 2010, an NSA division known as "Tailored Access Operations" reported it had gained access to then-president Calderon's email account, and turned his office into a "lucrative" source of information.

It said details of the alleged NSA hacking of Calderon's account were contained in a document leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Snowden's leaked information has prompted angry recriminations against Washington in Latin America, particularly Brazil.

According to Der Spiegel, the NSA succeeded in hacking a central server in the network of the Mexican presidency that was also used by other members of Calderon's cabinet, yielding a trove of information on diplomatic and economic matters.

Both revelations are causing significant diplomatic blowback for the US. And no wonder - these countries are US allies. And yet the US is spying on them as if they are enemies. And the US's only response is that its all legal (which rather misses the point).

Just another example of how US spying harms US interests...

Equality comes to Mexico

Last month, Argentina almost became the first part of Latin America to legalise same-sex marriage, after a judge in Buenos Aires ruled that it was legal. Unfortunately, the ruling was swiftly overturned and is now before the country's Supreme Court. While they've been dithering, Mexico City has beaten them to it, with Federal District legislators voting 39-20 in favour of equality. Better, they're now working on a same-sex adoption law as well.

So, on social issues, New Zealand is now behind Mexico. Makes you proud to be a kiwi, neh?

Mexico backsliding on the death penalty?

Mexico's congress has agreed to debate reinstating capital punishment in response to a recent crime wave. But fortunately that's as far as this knee-jerk response from paniced, scared people is likely to get - firstly, because Mexico's ban on the death penalty is entrenched in its constitution and would require a constitutional amendment to remove, and secondly because Mexico is a party to the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a binding human rights instrument banning the death penalty which has no exit clause. So, even if they want to, they can't - or at least not without significantly undermining their international standing and making it clear that their signature on a treaty isn't worth squat. OTOH, the latter hasn't stopped Liberia...

Destroying the evidence

In 1988, for the first time in its history, Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party faced a serious electoral challenge. And so they did what corrupt one-party states are apt to do: on election day, with the opposition in the lead, the computer system set up to tally the results shut down - and when it was restarted, it showed the PRI's Carlos Salinas winning with an absolute majority. Facing allegations of a massive electoral fraud, the PRI (with the aid of its friends the PAN) quickly moved to destroy the evidence, and ordered the ballots destroyed before they could be subjected to a manual recount.

Now, it's happening again:

Top electoral officials and judges are feeding doubts about the outcome of Mexico's presidential vote by declining to release details about a recount of 4 million ballots and by moving quickly to destroy all 41 million ballots, legal experts said Friday.

(Emphasis added).

Destroying the ballots is standard practice in democracies, as a way of preserving the secrecy of the vote. For example, New Zealand law, for example, requires that all used ballots, stubs, and polling both material be collected into sealed packets and stored for six months, before being destroyed unopened in the presence of the Clerk of the House of Representatives and the Chief Electoral Officer. However, this does not apply to packet is needed because the result has been challenged, or for a prosecution - or where it "may reasonably be expected to be". The latter certainly applies in Mexico, and you'd expect their law to have a similar provision.

Given the utter lack of transparency by Mexican election officials, this move doesn't look like defending the secrecy of the ballot so much as destroying the evidence...

What next for Mexico?

Back in July, Mexico went to the polls to elect a new President. The result was close - very close - and following allegations of fraud, defeated candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his followers took to the streets to demand a ballot-by-ballot recount. Meanwhile, the results were also challenged in the Federal Electoral Tribunal. Last night, the tribunal delivered its ruling, upholding the result and declaring Felipe Calderon the winner. While they found some discrepancies in the count, they were not deemed to have affected the overall result.

There are problems with this, notably the high level of secrecy surrounding the Tribunal's recount procedures and findings. In early August, the Tribunal ordered a recount of some 12,000 ballot boxes, resulting in the annulment of an unspecified number containing around 238,000 votes, and a slight shift in the overall totals away from Calderon. But details of exactly what the recount showed about the annulled boxes have not been released, and neither have corrected box-by-box tallies (meanwhile, Mexican TV reports of the procedure used are disturbing, to say the least). Against a backdrop of widespread, but one-sided discrepancies [PDF], and a history of election fraud by those in power, this encourages suspicion, rather than reducing it.

Democracy requires the utmost transparency in election processes, so that everyone can see they are fair. This is even more important when the results are disputed. Unfortunately, Mexico's election system has failed this basic test, and so suspicions are going to linger, regardless of what those in authority say.

The question now is whether AMLO and the PDR will accept the ruling, or whether their supporters will continue their campaign of protests and disruption. Currently, AMLO is threatening to establish a "parallel government", and has called for a convention of his followers in Mexico City on Independence Day in two week's time. They certainly have justification to call for a full and transparent recount and a reform of election law to ensure that results can be seen to be fair - but to go further? I'm not so sure. It may be better for Mexico's left to wait until next time, and use this as a rallying cry, rather than risk pushing things now.

Mexico: the recount

Mexico is currently recounting the votes in its presidential election, after preliminary results (which weren't really) showed only a 1% gap between the leading candidates. And the news so far is good:

With about 70% of votes counted, left-wing candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has a slight lead over his conservative rival, Felipe Calderon.

[...]

The latest recount figures on Wednesday gave Mr Lopez Obrador 36.87% of votes compared to 34.56% for Mr Calderon.

However, officials said it was far too soon to predict the final result.

And they're right; a 0.3% lead is only about 100,000 votes, and it could easily disappear if they have (for example) counted pro-AMLO southern areas before the pro-Calderon north. So we'll just have to wait and see...

For those interested, there's more discussion on European Tribune, including some translations of Mexican media articles.

Update: According to El Universal, at 85.98% counted, AMLO leads 36.47% to 34.79%. That's a far bigger lead, and looking far less likely to be overturned. I should also add that this isn't really a recount, but rather the full and formal count of the ballots. The preliminary results of the PREP (which is not a statistically valid mechanism etc) are really just a rough guide to voting trends, and carry no legal weight. Rather, they seem to exist to allow a candidate defeated by a landslide to concede on the night. But in tighter elections, they seem less useful, if not downright harmful...

Update 2: Back to the nailbiting. Reforma.com is tracking the results as they come in (the bar across the top), and its now AMLO 36.09%, Calderon 35.13%, with 92.45% counted. Whoever wins is going to do it by a nose. Of course, a single vote is all you need...

More things that make you sick

Apparantly I have a knack for sending Mike links that make him sick. The first was a New York Times article on a pipe foundry in Texas, whose emphesis on profits over worker safety resulted in the worst accident rate of any American workplace (containing some rather graphic descriptions of people having their arms sanded off by conveyer belts). So, in the interests of reguritation, we have the town of Ciudad Juarez on the Mexican border. Salon did an article about this place several months ago, reporting that "more than 325 women have been murdered in the free-trade boomtown of Ciudad Juarez in the past decade", and following up with a disturbing story of government indifference to (if not active collusion in) what seems like the activities of several serial killers. The Observer has now done a two part series on this hellhole, and its even worse.

There is a new word spoken in Ciudad Juarez: 'Feminocidio' - feminocide, the mass slaughter of women. There is no other word to describe what is happening: some 340 young women found murdered since 1992 in much the same manner as Sagrario, and a further 180 or so missing.

'They are dumped in public places, not even like animals, more like trash,' says Marisela Ortiz, from one of the groups campaigning to bring the killers to justice. The victims, she says, fit a pattern: 'They are poor, young, mainly migrants to the city looking to improve their lives in the factories. And when they are found, they have been tortured, mutilated, bruised, fractured or strangled and in every case violated - gang-raped.'

'The killers,' adds Marisela's colleague Rosario Acosta, 'take no trouble to cover up evidence, like most murders. With these, the evidence is brazen, right there, every time. Whoever is doing this knows they are immune from the law.'

There's more - victim's parents being taunted by the clothing of their dead children being returned to them in the dead of night, police cover-ups, frame-ups and executions of those who question them. It's your worst nightmare of callous corrupt third world society crossed with a serial killer movie. And all I could think was "there's gotta be a Vampire game in this".