The Limitations of Confidentiality in Governments
Professor David Morgan
Head of English Legal Courses Department
Abstract:
The requirement of confidentiality in regards to certain government issues is one of the most well-known forms of confidentiality. Modern international relations require modern countries to keep certain issues out of the public eye by keeping materials confidential. Throughout history, the practice of confidentiality within and between international governments has fluctuated in times of war and peace, and has been contingent on the strength of individual diplomatic relationships between nation states. What is treated as confidential, and how it is protected has shifted with the shifting of borders and national sovereignties, as well as models of government over time.
What is understood by the term ‘confidentiality’ when it is applied to government practice is that most governments require the hiding or censorship of particular types of information from the public. Although most governments make a claim of transparent dealings and allow varying degrees of public access to parliament and legislative records, in order to function effectively, all governments also retain the right, particularly in cases of military applications, to label information as secret or confidential and to protect it so the general public is not allowed access to it. The quality, type and quantity of the information that will be defined as confidential may vary from one country to another, and what might be treated as confidential material at a certain time, may not be so treated in another. Moreover, often confidentiality laws have an expiry date; in the interests of the public’s access to information, the classification of documents as sensitive expires over a period of time, and they become part of the public record when their sensitive nature has ‘worn off’; ‘Government secrecy in democracies is a result of a deliberate act on the part of those who govern to keep the governed from knowing something at a given point in time’.
Authoritarian governments tend to retain more discretion over what material they treat as confidential. Administrators or executors granted the power can decide that certain information is confidential, and prevent the public from access, relying on an informal code of conduct. Countries with less unilateral power structures control the flow of information in more democratic and legal way by enacting laws, and classifying in public and accountable ways which types of information are considered confidential.