10 people filed 820,000 information disclosure requests

A quarter of the 3.54 million information disclosure requests filed with the government and public organizations in the past two years were reportedly made by 10 civil petitioners. According to data released by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety on Thursday, more than 820,000 information disclosure requests were filed by 10 'malicious civil petitioners' during this period. In some cases, someone requested the same information en masse from 2,900 different government agencies, resulting in 285,000 requests per year, or an average of 780 requests per day. Some thoughtless individuals are abusing the system by filing malicious civil petitions.

Information disclosure requests are a legitimate right for citizens to monitor the actions of public authorities or get the information they need, but the behavior of these malicious civil petitioners is far from that. They paralyze work by using swear words in their requests or repeating the same request over and over again. Some local authorities even hired temporary workers to process a particular petitioner's request, photocopying documents for three months, but the petitioner didn’t come to receive them. One prison inmate avoided forced labor by filing a lawsuit and going to court after each denial of his information disclosure request.

Public servants who have experienced unreasonable demands, verbal abuse, and insults from malicious petitioners are often afraid of retaliative complaints filed by them, so they just put up with them and go on. Malicious petitions are not only a serious human rights violation but also obstruct government operations. When officials are tied up in malicious petitions, innocent citizens are harmed. The government's announced measures include limiting maliciously repeated requests for information disclosure and allowing officials to hang up on abusive calls. These measures are necessary to prevent malicious petitions from wasting administrative resources.

However, improving the satisfaction of the civil petition treatment is also necessary. Some of the cases cited by the government as malicious civil petitions are information that the government should, of course, be required to disclose, such as operation expenses or travel expenses of the head of an organization. A number of government officials also say that they are not in charge of the petition, so they continuously turn their calls to other departments. By proactively disclosing information that does not need to be kept confidential and improving the efficiency of civil petition handling, unnecessary petitions will be reduced, trust in the government and public institutions will increase, and the likelihood of the right to file a complaint being abused in retaliation will decrease.