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mysociety / alaveteli

Provide a Freedom of Information request system for your jurisdiction
https://alaveteli.org
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Change mention of "Freedom of Information" in outgoing request subjects to "Request for Information" #5039

Open RichardTaylor opened 5 years ago

RichardTaylor commented 5 years ago

A more generic subject line in outgoing messages may avoid requests being treated too narrowly as requests under the Freedom of Information Act; when actually a request may be responded to irrespective of a legal requirement to respond, or other access to information law, may apply eg. common law, Environmental Information Regulations, Human Rights law, The Civil Procedure Rules etc.

Notes: The subject line is changed in eir_only cases so it begins with: "Environmental Information Regulations request". That the site slips text into subject lines at all may well surprise users. It is important to flag correspondence as a request for information. There has been a tribunal case where a party said:

"[The requester] is usually clear in identifying when he wants his requests to be dealt with under FOIA. It is regrettable that he did not do so in this case"

and the judge said:

Although he is correct in stating that reference to FOIA is not a legal requirement, I think it is regrettable that he did not adopt his usual practice in this case and I would urge him to do so in the future

garethrees commented 5 years ago

Not adverse to this – it would reduce complexity around https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/blob/86392ed77386a89db40bb57e479d51ed283635fc/app/models/info_request.rb#L880-L900.

garethrees commented 5 years ago

Going to attempt to use the "Transfer issue" feature on GitHub to move this to https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli as this would be a global change. (Makes sense as other countries have Right to Know law, rather than FOI)…

RichardTaylor commented 3 years ago

This issue appears equivalent to adding the ability to make a request with no legislation associated with it, and then perhaps enabling that to be made the default for an Alaveteli installation.

Linking this to the discussion at:

https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/6207#issuecomment-820406814

RichardTaylor commented 1 year ago

Given mySociety's current interest in requests for environmental information this might be something there is now greater organisational interest in addressing.

WilliamWDTK commented 11 months ago

We've had a case where a authority was confused by how to treat a request, when the requester explicitly mentioned EIR in the body, but had apparently (from the perspective of the authority) referred to Freedom of Information in the subject.