Justice ministry ordered to respond to Pati requests
A justice campaigner has called on public authorities to respond to requests for records in the statutory time frame after he was ignored for months by a government ministry.
Eron Hill, of the Bermuda Equal Justice Initiative, made four requests to the Ministry of Legal Affairs for legal aid records this year, but each time it failed to provide him with a decision by the deadline set out in the Public Access to Information Act.
Information Commissioner Gitanjali Gutierrez has now ordered the public authority — since renamed the Ministry of Justice — to respond to the requests by October 21 or face Supreme Court proceedings.
Mr Hill told The Royal Gazette that he was frustrated at the ministry’s failure to respond.
“Pati is pointless if the public authorities aren't going to comply until the ICO issues an order, which takes months given the timeline, and it's really off-putting for public authorities to use that tactic to simply delay having to furnish information,“ he said.
The Information Commissioner has issued 11 decisions this year related to the failure of public authorities to respond, including the four recent ones — titled 26, 27, 28 and 29 of 2024 — about Mr Hill’s requests.
The other public authorities that did not meet the statutory time frame were the Bermuda Police Service (three times), the Accountant General’s department, the Cabinet Office, the Corporation of Hamilton and the Department of Health.
Mr Hill, who gave The Royal Gazette permission to identify him as the Pati requester, submitted his requests to the legal affairs ministry in April and May.
He asked for records related to an appeal funded by the Legal Aid Office; amounts paid by that office; legal aid certificates, a contract extension and work permit applications; and a former Legal Aid counsel.
In each case, he did not receive a decision within the initial six-week window decreed by the Pati Act. When he asked the permanent secretary for an internal review about the lack of responses, he was again ignored and received no response within the statutory six weeks.
He appealed to Ms Gutierrez, who launched a review. She was told by the ministry that the Legal Aid Office’s information officer had “not been copied in some earlier e-mails”.
In her decisions, she encouraged Pati requesters to “copy in the public authority’s information officer in all correspondence with the public authority about their Pati request, due to the information officer’s integral role throughout the Pati process”.
Ms Gutierrez added: “Doing so can assist the public authority to meet their Pati deadlines.”
She suggested that the ministry might want to apologise to Mr Hill.
In 2016, the year after the Pati Act came into effect, the Information Commissioner called for a reduction in the “lengthy” six-week time frame that public authorities have to make a decision about access.
She said international best practice was for a decision to be made in 20 days and that Bermuda’s law was more than double the international standard, disadvantaging requesters.
The Gazette has contacted the justice ministry for comment.
• To view the decisions and the ICO press release, see Related Media
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