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.