The People’s Right to Know and State Secrecy

Dorota Mokrosinska

doi:10.1017/cjlj.2018.4

Abstract

Among the classic arguments which advocates of open government use to fight government secrecy is the appeal to a “people’s right to know.” I argue that the employment of this idea as a conceptual weapon against state secrecy misfires. I consider two prominent arguments commonly invoked to support the people’s right to know government-held information: an appeal to human rights and an appeal to democratic citizenship. While I concede that both arguments ground the people’s right to access government information, I argue that they also limit this right and in limiting it, they establish a domain of state secrecy. The argument developed in the essay provides a novel interpretation of Dennis Thompson’s claim, who in his seminal work on the place of secrecy in democratic governance, has argued that some of the best reasons for secrecy are the same reasons that argue for openness and against secrecy.

Highlights

I argue that the principled opposition between the people’s right to know and state secrecy is not entirely correct
My claim is that the same moral principles that ground the people’s right to access government information, establish a domain of state secrecy. In his seminal work defending a degree of secrecy in democratic governance, Dennis Thompson has famously argued that some of the best reasons for secrecy are the same reasons that argue for openness and against secrecy.[6]
“Some of the best reasons for secrecy rest on the very same democratic values that argue against secrecy,” Dennis Thompson, “Democratic Secrecy” (1999) 114:2 Political Science Q 181 at 182

Summary

Dorota Mokrosinska

Among the classic arguments which advocates of open government use to fight government secrecy is the appeal to a “people’s right to know.” In its core meaning, the people’s right to know is understood as a right held by any individual, as against a government, to know about the workings and dealings of that government.[1]. My claim is that the same moral principles that ground the people’s right to access government information, establish a domain of state secrecy. In his seminal work defending a degree of secrecy in democratic governance, Dennis Thompson has famously argued that some of the best reasons for secrecy are the same reasons that argue for openness and against secrecy.[6] I see my argument as a way of fleshing out Thompson’s claim. I analyze the people’s right to know government information from the perspective of two dominant theories of human rights, the naturalistic conception and the political conception

The naturalistic conception

The political conception

The efficacy objection

The accountability objection

Conclusion