Passive transparency in judicial: an analysis of the application of the law for access to information in state Courts of Justice

Abstract

The Law on Access to Information (LAI) guarantees Brazilian society the right of access to non-confidential public information. This law applies to the executive, legislative and judiciary branches of the three levels of government. Previous studies on transparency conducted in the judiciary have shown that requests for information supported by LAI have not been satisfactorily met. However, these studies conducted an analysis of transparency only from the perspective of legal compliance, without to investigate the possible causes of the lack of transparency. On the other hand, this research identified in the literature some structural characteristics of the Judiciary, which probably have a negative impact on transparency and, therefore, on accountability. Considering these characteristics as inducing formalistic practices of transparency, this study aims to investigate the compliance of the Judiciary of the states of the federation with meeting the demands for information supported by LAI. For this investigation, a stratified sample was selected, corresponding to 50% (fifty per cent) of the Courts of Justice of the States Brazil, to which requests for information were sent, that were formulated with the purpose of making possible an analysis not only of legal compliance but also of the impacts of the structural features of the Judiciary on the disclosure of information. The results of the study show a low rate of satisfactory classification of these requests, revealing, besides an excessive formalism, that the judiciary is a bureaucratic structure with little commitment to the availability of information.