General and Judicial Transparency Evaluations
In 2014, the Public Transparency Program undertook its first two major evaluations. The first “General Evaluation” targeted 8 different jurisdictions; the second, “Evaluation of the Judiciary”, focused on the country’s judges. Both reports can be found in our 2014 report, The Brazilian State and Transparency: Evaluating Compliance with Freedom of Information . This report was presented at a November 2014 at the National Seminar on the Evaluation of Government Transparency held at the FGV and sponsored by the OSF.
The first project consisted of 453 freedom of information (FOI) requests based on 55 different questions, targeted at 133 public entities across the three branches of government in eight jurisdictions. The jurisdictions included the Federal Government, the Federal District, and the states of Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, as well as their respective capitals: Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The overall response rate was 69%, the overall accuracy rate, 57%, and the average response time was 21 days. The state and capital city of Rio de Janeiro state were the worst performers, with response rates of 27% and 38% respectively, whereas the federal government, the Federal District, and São Paulo all achieved relatively high response and accuracy rates. Read the executive summary or the whole audit in our report, The Brazilian State and Transparency: Evaluating Compliance with Freedom of Information.
Our second project, published in the same 135-page report, consisted of 7 separate FOI requests concerning the remuneration, promotion, and careers of judges as well as safeguards against nepotism. These seven questions were submitted to 40 different courts, comprising 264 requests in total. The aggregate results show that out of a total of 264 FOI requests, 160 (61%) received a response, of which only 69 (26%) were deemed accurate according to the definition established in the methodology. The accuracy rate of the responses was low relative to the rate observed in the General Audit. However, the accuracy rate varied significantly across the courts analyzed, between 5% and 62%, depending on the question submitted. Finally, the vast majority of the courts analyzed did not have specific platforms for the submission of FOI requests. Read the executive summary (starting on page 18) or the whole report at the links above.
Read the full audit here:
Estado Brasileiro e Transparência
Download the answers to FOI requests here:
Judiciary FOI requests (147 KB)
Evaluation of the Public Prosecutor's Office
In 2015, the Public Transparency Program evaluated Brazil’s Ministério Público (MP), often referred to as the Public Prosecutor’s office. Given its constitutional independence and sweeping powers, the MP is often considered the country’s fourth branch of government. Here we replicated the questions we asked of judges and the judiciary in 2014 – on remuneration, promotions, careers, as well as safeguards against nepotism. To the 193 FOI requests sent out we received a 51% response rate, of which 27% were deemed minimally accurate or better. As with the judiciary, the MP has adopted no FOI-specific platform to send requests and appeals and receive responses. Read more in our report, Evaluation of Transparency in the Ministério Público.
Read the full audit here:
Avaliação de Transparência do Ministério Público
Download the answers to FOI requests here:
Transparency of the Policing of Protests
Our work with Open Society Justice Initiative was the first of many sectoral audits now in progress. Applying 14 queries to better understand the information on the policing of protests, the study adopted a ‘citizen search’ approach in which information was retrieved through both online searches of public websites and FOI requests. A total of five countries – Brazil, India, Mexico, South Africa, and the United Kingdom – were evaluated for the completeness of information relative to normatively derived benchmarks developed consensually by policing experts. The evaluation was characterized by enormous variation in performance, with South Africa and the UK scoring at 78.5% and 54% completeness, respectively, while Brazil, India, and Mexico all scored below 25%. Read more in our report, “Police Transparency: Evaluating Access to Information in Relation to the Policing of Public Gatherings in Brazil, India, Mexico, South Africa and the United Kingdom”.
Research in Progress
In 2016, the Public Transparency Program is currently undertaking several sectoral evaluations, which include:
- Remuneration of officials at the municipal level
- Municipal Level Transparency
- The Transparency of Non-Profit Funding
- Governmental Advertising in the News Media
- Surveillance and smart-city initiatives at the municipal level
More details will be provided at a later date, and results will be presented at the Second National Seminar on the Evaluation of Government Transparency, on September 22, 2016.