Resumo
“You idiot. You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of it”. This is what Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the UK, wrote about himself in his autobiography when thinking about the fact that his government brought in a Freedom of Information Act. The Freedom of Information (FOI) Act2000 came into force in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 2005 (Scotland has parallel legislation) and has since changed the nature of the relationship between the citizen and the state. The Environmental Information Regulations Regulations 2004 (EIR) is a similar set of laws that, Europe-wide, gives access to environmental information. As universities and museums are covered by the FOI and EIR, over the last few ears there have been several high profile incidents where scientific data has been requested and the controversies that have resulted have been splashed on the front pages of newspapers. Brazil’s access to information laws are over a year old and this paper aims to discuss, through three famous case studies, the problems and successes that have been experienced in the UK in dealing with information requests for sensitive scientific data. The paper aims to share with Brazilian colleagues the lessons that UK institutions have had to learn the hard way.
