This week, The Royal Gazette joins forces with media organisations in the United States and around the world to mark "Sunshine Week", an annual event aimed at promoting, defending and educating governments and ordinary people about the public's right to access to information.

Most readers will know that this newspaper has been campaigning for this important right for the last few months and the results have been largely encouraging.

Many private citizens have expressed their interest in and support for this right, and a number of leading groups have also signalled their support. It has been very heartening to see politicians and community leaders from across the political spectrum support this, and particular kudos need to go to former Premier Alex Scott, who set the Public Access to Information ball rolling and will be writing later this week to explain how it can actually increase trust between government and its citizens. The Opposition United Bermuda Party has also thrown its support behind the initiative and has moved for the formation of a joint select committee.

The word from the Cabinet Office too is that the Public Access to Information Act (PATI) is continuing to wend its way through the Government bureaucracy and this is to be welcomed and supported, although this newspaper would welcome a greater sense of urgency. It is critical to note that this has never been a partisan or political campaign.

Secrecy in government is not limited to any individual, party or country. But it is widely accepted that openness and transparency in Government improves accountability and empowers the ordinary citizen.

Democratic Party Senator Patrick Leahy, who has been a leading supporter of right to know laws in the US, wrote in 2004: "The public's right to know is one of the foundations of our freedoms and our democracy. Knowing what our government is doing promotes accountability and trust and lubricates the checks and balances that make our system work."

That's not to say that the right to know is all-encompassing. We all recognise that there will be matters of national security, patient confidentiality and the like that should be confidential. The danger is that politicians and bureaucrats can use these kinds of legitimate concerns to extend secrecy where it is not needed and this needs to be guarded against.

That is the very debate that is going on in the US, where the War on Terror has led to an erosion of the US Freedom of Information Act's powers. Sen. Leahy noted in 2004 that "when structural protections like FOIA are weakened, the erosion can be rapid, and lasting".

But at least the US has structural protections; in Bermuda there is no legal right to information set up by a specific act. And even where the public has rights, as in inspecting planning applications, it is not absolute. There were attempts to remove, for example, civil servants comments from planning applications in the 1980s and 1990s, while today it is difficult to get access to files concerning special development orders – where no public application may ever have been made. This is just one example, and the Department of Planning has generally been one of the most accessible departments of Government; but it illustrates the difficulties that can arise when there is no right to know.

The documented difficulties that the Ombudsman has faced in getting Government information shows how hard this can be. If a public official with legally enshrined rights can face bureaucratic roadblocks, what chance does the ordinary citizen have?

So somewhere between buying Easter eggs, building kites, going to church and cooking fishcakes, take some time out this week to think about freedom of information. It is your right to know.