Plans to change the Freedom of Information regime will restrict the rights of citizens, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties has said.
In a paper submitted to the Oireachtas Joint Committee of Finance and the Public Service, the council said any suggestions that the Government's amendments did not change the rights of ordinary citizens were misleading.
With the Government Bill expected to go through the final stage debate in the Seanad next Thursday, the Minister of State for Justice, Mr Willie O'Dea, said he believed that any amendments to the Bill would be only technical in nature.
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties is expected to appear before a meeting of the committee on Wednesday. In a 13-page submission, it criticised in strong terms the report by a group of senior civil servants which was behind many of the changes now sought by the Government.
The council said the civil servants made many assertions about problems caused by the Act but provided no examples of how these had happened in practice.
The council, whose paper was prepared before the civil servants appeared before the committee last Thursday, called for a wider review of the current legislation in advance of any change. It opposed restrictions on the right to information in the absence of justifiable evidence that harm was being caused to the functioning of Government, or to individuals.
It was also opposed to the increase in exemptions in the new Act: "The recommendation to change the discretion of a head of Department to refuse access to Cabinet records, to a mandatory refusal of access completely reverses the presumption in favour of access to documents."
The council added: "The creation of a regime where there is automatic refusal of a request with no regard to the type of record sought, no regard as to whether the information may already be in the public sphere, no regard for the public interest in having access to the record or any harm caused by its release, flies in the face of a culture of transparency and accountability."
It also said: "The recommendation to widen the type of record which could be automatically refused from records solely for the purpose of the transaction of Government business to records primarily for that purpose will again remove a category of documents out of the reach of citizens, without regard to the merits of the request.
"The interpretation that a record was created primarily for the purpose of Government business can be used widely to exclude access to documents which are used for purposes other than Government meetings but may at some stage have been used in a Government meeting."
With the Opposition expected to renew its campaign against the changes next week, Mr O'Dea said he believed that technical aspects of the Bill could be improved. Emphasising that he was speaking only in a personal capacity, Mr O'Dea said: "I could see a situation where there would be a need for technical amendments, but basically, the Government will be sticking to the substance of it."
He said the designation of "Cabinet documents" in the Bill could be made "in a more elegant way". On the replacement of clause allowing the release of files "related to" personal records with a clause stating that only files "containing" personal records, Mr O'Dea said the new designation "may be too narrow".
