Laura Neuman has travelled the world and seen a lot of transparency laws as part of her job as access to information project manager for the Carter Center in the States.

But she has never known a country respond in the way Bermuda did when asked to comment on a proposed public access to information (PATI) bill. The call for feedback from the Cabinet Office prompted 437 responses from organisations and individuals before the November 30 deadline — and that figure has since risen to 530.

"I think your readers need to know how absolutely incredible that is and what a show of commitment and interest," she told The Royal Gazette. "It's nothing I have seen in dozens and dozens of countries we work in. It sparked people's imaginations and that's really, really important. That's the first step to changing the culture."

Ms Neuman visited the Island last week as an independent consultant at the invitation of the newly formed Coalition for Community Activism in Bermuda. Her brief was to talk to interested parties — including the Premier and other politicians — about what makes a good freedom of information law and share her views on why government openness is so essential.

"This idea of access to information so underpins everything that we are all trying to do, whether it's good governance, human rights, socioeconomic rights," she said. "How can people assure themselves of a clean environment, good education and health care if they don't have the basic information they need to do that?"

Her own interest in freedom of information stems from her days as an attorney representing people below the poverty line in the US.

She used America's FOI law to investigate the benefits her clients were getting — and became an expert on access to information in the process. Now the associate director for the Americas Program at the Carter Center — a global human rights organisation founded by former US President Jimmy Carter — she is constantly reminded of how information can change lives.

She feels citizens often aren't aware of the personal information they could gain access to if they only had the right — items such as birth certificates, land title documents, files on social security or war veterans' benefits, and medical records. "What information is it that we need? Oftentimes, it's just those personal documents that are going to be able to help you do a whole series of other things, those very personal documents that government is holding for us.

"I think that's an important piece of it that somehow doesn't get enough attention. When we look at the US there are four million requests a year. That freaks out governments but the vast majority, three million, are for personal records."

Ms Neuman cites other countries where FOI has improved lives, including in India, where the right to information movement exposed the underpayment of daily wage earners and farmers on government projects and exposed corruption in government expenditure.

In Jamaica, citizens used the law to find out about standards in state-run children's homes and help the authorities improve them.

And Ms Neuman cites another example in the Caribbean country where the law helped divulge how taxpayers' money was being spent — or, rather, misspent. "Colleagues went through the national budget and found out that large amounts of money were being spent on the office of the railroad director. The railroad had closed in 1990!"

Ms Neuman is at pains to point out that FOI laws are not just there for journalists to find stories or uncover wrongdoing. "Who is going to use this on a day-to-day basis? The citizens. It's to open the playing field for everyone to have the right to ask for those documents that are either about them or about their communities.

"This is not a hammer against government. It helps government in being able to answer their citizens' inquiries, as well as to be more effective and efficient in their own daily work. Very few pieces of legislation can do that and that's why I think it's such a powerful tool."

She describes how police in the US became much more successful in finding abducted children after the introduction of the "Amber Law". Previously, there was a policy of releasing no information to the public while officers searched for a youngster. "Now the minute a child is abducted, as much information as possible is given to the public," said Ms Neuman. "Now you have 10,000 people looking rather than ten police officers and the recovery rate has been incredible. It's really about us helping government to be successful and the way we do that is with information."

She hopes to see PATI as part of a "family of laws" aimed at improving transparency here, including legislation to protect whistle-blowers and strengthen the policies and procedures of the Archives and Civil Service. "On its own, it's not going to do everything," she explains. But the real key to success, she believes, is in getting the public on board, not just the Government and civil servants.

"It's very much about changing the culture so that they begin to believe that it is their right to ask and their right to know. It's always a struggle getting people to recognise their right to information."

l For more on the Carter Center's access to information work visit www.cartercenter.org/peace/americas/information.html.