Ulla Hildert’s office is on the seventh floor of a simple but elegant Swedish government building, Rosenbad, that looks out over one of the many stretches of water that bisect Stockholm, the “Venice of the North”.
Hildert works for Prime Minister Goran Persson and is responsible for the administration of the system of
public access to his documents. So the fact that bright light streams into her office is entirely apt: “Sunlight,” goes the cliche, “is the best form of disinfectant”.
I tell Hildert that I have come to inspect the prime minister’s correspondence. “Of course, would you like to see today’s correspondence first,” she replies. No, I would like to see correspondence with Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. She types and out come two lists. One, for Mandela, shows 27 items of correspondence from 1992 until now. From Mbeki, there are just two items, which turn out to be short notes of congratulation from Mbeki in relation to the Swedish presidency of the European Union during the first half of last year.
I ask to see the actual documents of two on the Mandela list. One, from 1998, has as its title “EU-South Africa trade negotiations”. I imagine a request for support from Mandela against the stubbornness of the French and Portuguese. “Oh dear, I am so sorry,” Hildert says, “this correspondence has been marked ‘secret’.” She asks me whether I would like to take the matter up for review.
One of the many qualities of the Swedish system of openness is that although there are exemptions to public access, such as international relations, they can be reviewed again and again. This is entirely sensible: what may be secret one year may no longer require protection a year later. In Britain and elsewhere you have to wait at least 30 years before what by then may be entirely innocuous documents are made public.
I ask: What will the review involve? Hildert informs me that she will speak that afternoon with the prime minister’s special adviser to see if he will permit access on the basis of changed circumstances. If not, the Cabinet will need to review the matter and, she says, they will only be meeting next week and would I mind waiting that long?
A number of things go through my mind. Am I dreaming? Can it really all be so civilised? And, in contradistinction, I imagine walking into, say, 10 Downing Street and asking to see Mr Blair’s correspondence … Well, I say to Hildert, I really don’t want to intrude upon the Swedish Cabinet’s time, but if they have nothing better to do … well, why not?*
The other correspondence had no such exemption and I made copies of it. It is rather interesting. On September 8 2000 Mandela wrote to the Swedish prime minister asking for support for the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s work on HIV/Aids. Mandela writes: “It is estimated that the position is so serious that approximately 10 teachers die of Aids every month, and that one student dies in one university every week.” And: “In a neighbouring country three Cabinet members have died from this pandemic.”
He then informs Persson that the response from the United States has been “excellent”; the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation donated $10-million, and $7,5-million came from Gates’s partner, Craig McCaw; in addition, president Bill Clinton contributed $5-million.
These are substantial sums of money, which makes the big point about the sort of transparency that is apparently ingrained within the Swedish bureaucracy: it promotes genuine accountability. People can ask questions about the facts revealed by such public documents; with knowledge they can act; and so the wheel of accountability turns.
This is part of a global trend. In Rajasthan in India, for example, a new state access to information law is being used by community organisations to expose corruption and ensure that people get the houses and hospitals promised to and budgeted for them. In a remarkable video, The Right to Information ? the Right to Live, one organisation shows how it assembled a village of people and then amused and appalled them by reading from a document obtained under the new law recording the building of a canal to bring clean water to the village. Of course, unscrupulous middle-men had siphoned off the funds and the canal was a fiction. One man had, according to the record, been paid for two weeks’ work and the hire of his plough. “Impossible,” he says, “I was away in Delhi that month.”
The Swedes have had their freedom of information law for 250 years ? which raises the question, what was or was not happening in Swedish society to prompt the passing of the first such law about 200 years before any other nation? The short answer is that it was busy sorting out a social consensus and a system of government that has provided stability and quality of public service ever since. Openness is easier when there is political and social stability because it is probably easier for the government to have confidence in itself and in its people. The Social Democrats have ruled for 61 of the past 72 years and look likely to extend this after the general election later this year.
South Africa has its own openness law, the Promotion of Access to Information Act 2000, which has been in force for about a year. Already it is becoming clear that the South African bureaucracy lacks the confidence to see that openness is a friend and not a foe. This is a question of mentality as much as system. And on this, it has a lot it could learn from Sweden.
* I have subsequently been notified by Hildert that the secrecy protection has been removed after my request for a review and that a copy of the correspondence is in the post.
Richard Calland has been in Stockholm as a member of a three-person delegation to study Sweden’s system of governmental openness, as a part of a project grant from the Swedish International Development Agency to the Open Democracy Advice Centre
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