House oversight and government reform committee
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The agencies in question have offered little justification for these delays, which can significantly undermine the potential impact of the data in our work, as the information can become so outdated as to be useless.įOIA requires the US government to share information “unless disclosure would hurt national security, violate personal privacy or expose business secrets or confidential decision-making in certain areas.” Therefore, FOIA responses sometimes include redactions. We are also currently appealing a FOIA denial from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for a request filed nearly three years ago (July 2012) regarding the immigration status and criminal history of deported non-citizens. A hearing on the litigation is scheduled for this June. However, even after negotiations in which BOP agreed to produce responsive information, the agency’s redactions were so extensive as to make some of the information meaningless. Only after Human Rights Watch filed a lawsuit and the BOP was instructed by a federal judge to provide information did it begin to produce a portion of the requested information. For example, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) stalled for 18 months and ultimately provided no responsive information to a FOIA request we filed in August 2012 on the numbers of people in federal prison charged or convicted of terrorism-related offenses and their conditions of confinement. In our worst horror stories, the government simply refuses to provide information, or provides unresponsive information, and the resolution of a FOIA request drags on for many years. It is not uncommon for us to wait nearly a year for an initial response to a FOIA request. Our own recent experience using FOIA is unfortunately consistent with the Associated Press’s accounts of government agencies denying requests, delaying responses, charging exorbitant fees, censoring responses and generally obfuscating records requests at unprecedented levels.Ī partial list of the problems we have encountered in using FOIA includes: However, as the Oversight Committee is aware, we are witnessing what the Associated Press has recently described as a procedural and substantive breakdown of the system. At Human Rights Watch, we rely on the law as an essential tool to help document potential rights abuses by US agencies, as we did in our reports on the use of far and frequent detention transfers within the immigration system and the impact of US border prosecutions. The US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a critical instrument to ensure accountable government and make effective the American people’s right to know information of public interest. RE: Freedom of Information Act requests by Human Rights Watchĭear Chairman Chaffetz and Ranking Member Cummings, The Honorable Elijah Cummings, Ranking Member On May 20, 2015, Human Rights Watch sent this letter to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for its hearing "Ensuring Transparency through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)," on June 2, 2015, to detail the many recent problems we've encountered attempting to use FOIA in our research gathering.Ĭommittee on Oversight and Government Reform