Disclosure Requests Research Articles

Factors influencing public officials' responses to requests for information disclosure

This study sought to define factors that influence bureaucrats' decisions on whether to grant information disclosure requests. Whereas previous studies of this issue focused mainly on factors related to the work of a specific government agency, this study expanded that focus to include information-related and environmental factors, drawing on blame avoidance motivation theory, street-level bureaucracy theory, and principal–agent theory. Decision-tree analysis revealed that, while various factors influenced public officials' disclosure decisions, Information-related factors were the most influential, and blame avoidance was a stronger motivator than realizing public interests. Therefore, a crucial point for successful implementation of an information disclosure system is to prevent in advance the interference of blame avoidance motivation in the release of information.

Sharing “Sex Secrets” on Facebook: A Content Analysis of Youth Peer Communication and Advice Exchange on Social Media about Sexual Health and Intimate Relations

Social media present opportunities and challenges for sexual health communication among young people. This study is one of the first to examine the actual use of Facebook for peer communication of sexual health and intimate relations. Content analysis of 2186 anonymous posts in a “sex secrets” Facebook page unofficially affiliated with a Hong Kong University shows gender balance among posters, inclusiveness of sexual minorities, and frequent sharing of personal experiences in storytelling or advice seeking. The findings illuminate young people’s health concerns regarding condom use, avoiding pain, birth control, sexually transmitted infections, and body appearance. Relational concerns found entailed sexual practices, expectations, and needs—predominantly within dating relationships and include not wanting to have sex. Supportive communication among users was prevalent. A majority of posts involved advice solicitation in the form of request for opinion or information (30.38%), request for advice (13.68%), situation comparison (5.40%), or problem disclosure (9.97%). Comments to the advice-seeking posts were mostly supportive (69.49%); nonsupportive responses (unsolicited messages and gratuitous humor) were concentrated with ambiguous advice solicitations. These findings hold implications for understanding self-disclosure of intimate concerns within social networks, and attuning sexual health intervention on social media to young people’s actual needs and advice preferences.

P228 Sexual & reproductive healthcare outcomes among those at risk of child sexual exploitation: a retrospective review

IntroductionThe purpose of Multi-Agency Sexual Exploitation (MASE) panels is to consider cases of high risk victims and offenders in relation to Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) and the criminal justice response to offenders. A multiagency approach should ensure young people (YP) are supported by appropriate services including SRH.MethodsA retrospective review of a selection of MASE cohorts from 2016 from three services across England was undertaken. The names of YP were cross-referenced with the SRH clinic system in the locality to determine if they had accessed the service. Information was collected on reason for attendance, sexual health screening, contraception and gravidity. Data was analysed using Excel.ResultsOf 92 young people discussed at MASE panel, 64 (69.6%) were known to SRH services. The age range was 12–19 years (median 16). Sixty (93.7%) were female. The most common reasons for attendance were request for contraception (35.9%), pregnancy testing (25%) and disclosure of sexual assault (10.9%).19 (29.7%) individuals had tested positive for chlamydia on at least one occasion (25 episodes in total). Fourteen pregnancies were reported with 8 resulting in termination.DiscussionRates of chlamydial infection and pregnancy were high among the MASE cohorts reviewed. The multi-agency response should provide an opportunity to address health needs of this vulnerable group. Interventions should be targeted accordingly including prioritising referral into SRH services into the care plans of those identified to be at risk of CSE.

Democratic deliberation, respect and personal storytelling

In pluralistic deliberative settings, where people come from different cultural and social backgrounds, sharing personal experiences and narratives in the first person is often advocated as a preferential means to bridge the informational and motivational gap between members of different social groups. Whatever the epistemic merits of personal storytelling in democratic deliberation may be, the request for transparency and disclosure of people’s private experiences that this practice entails may be objectionable on moral grounds, because it disrespects people as agents who have practical authority over their own lives. Having people disclose their personal stories in public can humiliate them, reify them and abridge their personal liberties. What is worse, these harms are especially likely to be inflicted upon members of marginalised or disadvantaged minorities. For deliberativists, this should be a matter of concern because respect for people as agents is arguably one of the founding principles of democratic deliberation.

Compelled Disclosure of Confidential Information in Patient Safety Research.

The protection of confidential research data is of key importance to clinical patient safety research. A review of selected Canadian and American case law indicates that although the relationship between researcher and participant has not been recognized as privileged, court-ordered disclosure of confidential research information seems to be a rare occurrence. In this review, we examine how confidentiality issues are presented in informed consent form templates and in relevant research ethics policies. We find an agreement among research policy documents that all information gathered should be treated as confidential, unless otherwise required by law. Confidentiality provisions in informed consent forms reflect the reality that in some cases, the law can compel disclosure of confidential data. There is, therefore, a potential tension between the law and existing research ethics policy. It has been suggested that researchers have an ethical and possibly legal duty to actively resist disclosure requests. We conclude that it is reasonable for researchers to disclose, as part of the informed consent process, how rare successful disclosure demands are and that steps will be taken to oppose such demands.

We Know What you did Last Summer, and 30 Years ago: Criminal Records Disclosure and State Regulatory Discretion

Despite a number of adverse court rulings and amendments to the legislation as a consequence, the system of disclosure in relation to criminal records in England and Wales still gives cause for concern. As other studies have pointed out, the disclosure system in England and Wales is out of step with other jurisdictions in that it permits disclosure of information which is out of date, relates to matters which do not result in criminal conviction, and is largely irrelevant to the activity which triggered the request for disclosure. Such a system is said to be justified in order to protect the public. Human rights concerns dictate that public protection is balanced against an individual’s right to respect for his/her private and family life and the opportunity to rehabilitate oneself. In an attempt to achieve such a balance the disclosure regime in England and Wales provides for a ‘two-tier’ system of ‘ordinary’ and ‘enhanced’ disclosure, with the latter providing information on an individual beyond convictions and cautions. The Disclosure and Barring Service, which operates the disclosure system, reports that ‘Enhanced’ Disclosure is the norm for employers and regulators to seek, even where that level of disclosure is not justified under the statutory provisions. In this study I analyse data from existing research, court decisions, publicly available police policies and records from state and professional regulators, to examine how the police exercise their discretion on disclosure and how regulators exercise their discretionary powers in the light of the information disclosed. The findings of this study suggest that the amendments to the disclosure regime in the light of adverse rulings are inadequate to achieve the appropriate balance between public protection and rehabilitation or privacy. The study proposes ways of structuring police and regulatory discretion in order to achieve a fairer balance.

The Substance of Procedure: Non-Party Disclosure in the Canadian and U.S. Online Music Sharing Litigation

The music recording industry is suing Internet subscribers in Canada and the United States for alleged copyright infringement in unprecedented numbers. The procedure for obtaining non-party disclosure has taken on renewed significance in this context, as the industry requests disclosure of identifying and private information from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who provide online communicators with their Internet connections. Legislative measures adopted in the U.S. expedited the disclosure process through an administrative mechanism with low threshold requirements for issuance of a subpoena against an ISP. In Canada (and after late 2004 in the U.S.), disclosure requests proceeded under federal rules of court. Comparison of the expedited administrative and the judicially interpreted rules-based processes raises important questions about the connection between procedure and substance, and procedural justice more generally. Not only are more permissive rules for disclosure often inconsistent with protecting substantive rights, such as privacy, bin they also cannot be presumed to enhance the likelihood of achieving accurate substantive legal outcomes. If non-party disclosure rules are not contextually designed and implemented to reflect the power and resource imbalance between the plaintiff music industry and the individual defendants pursued in online music sharing litigation, the public and private interest in substantive adjudication of critical questions relating to copyright law may be foreclosed for reasons wholly unrelated to substantive legal merits.

EU Competition Law Developments in the Aviation Sector: January to June 2015

The first half of 2015 continues to highlight the continued importance of competition law in the aviation sector. This article summarizes the main competition law developments over the past six months and then provides the reader with greater detail of each of these developments. The European Commission (‘Commission’) has concluded its third investigation into the global alliance transatlantic cooperation by accepting commitments in the Sky Team investigation. The Commission has again been requested to review a merger involving Aer Lingus, but this time it is IAG’s interest in the airline that was notified to the Commission. With follow-on damages actions1 continuing to play out in court, there has also been an increase in the number of judgments handed down clarifying specific points of law, particularly surrounding the complainant’s request for disclosure. With a non-confidential version of the Commission’s airfreight decision (decided in November 2010) still outstanding, complainants’ requests for access to the confidential version of the decision (available to parties fined by the Commission) continues to dominate cases before the courts in the UK as well as the Netherlands. In April 2015, two of the UK’s competition authorities were merged: The Office for Fair Trading (‘OFT’) and the Competition Commission (‘CC’) were merged to form the Competition and Markets Authority (‘CMA’).

X. Wang: Open environmental information upon disclosure request in China: the paradox of legal mobilization

X. Wang: Open environmental information upon disclosure request in China: the paradox of legal mobilization

The RedTube copyright infringement affair in Germany: shame on who?

Recently, tens of thousands of German Internet users were confronted with copyright infringement claims for allegedly watching porn clips on the streaming platform RedTube.com. The alleged copyright infringers received ‘Abmahnung’ cease and desist letters that gave them an opportunity to settle copyright infringements out of court by paying rights-holders €250 in compensation. While in cases relating to peer-to-peer file-sharing, the IP address of a peer can easily be identified,1 the RedTube case raises the question how consumers of a stream could be identified. In addition, it raises the question of whether the consumption of a stream is illegal under German law. Assuming that this is not the case, this analysis of the RedTube case highlights that the system of Abmahnungen is prone to abuse in an Internet context. Several weaknesses of the current system are identified, which show that disclosure requests are not thoroughly assessed by courts and that lawyers are far too willing to send out cease and desist letters although an infringement is not obvious. This environment allowed the emergence of anti-piracy business models that succeed in turning infringements into profit and that do not hesitate to make unfounded claims.

Constructing and Communicating Privacy Boundaries: How Family Medicine Physicians Manage Patient Requests for Religious Disclosure in the Clinical Interaction

Religion/spirituality (R/S) is an important component of some patients’ psychosocial framework when facing illness. While many patients report an increased desire for R/S dialogue in clinical interaction, especially when facing a frightening diagnosis, some physicians report discomfort talking about R/S and hold various beliefs regarding the appropriateness of such discussions. Not only do physicians manage conversations centering on patient disclosures in the clinical visit, they must also navigate requests to share their own personal information. Farber et al. (2000) found that over a 12-month period nearly 40% of physicians reported that patients asked questions that transgressed professional boundaries. This article uses Petronio’s communication privacy management theory as a lens through which to situate our understanding of how family medicine physicians construct and communicate privacy boundaries in response to patient requests for religious disclosure. Results provide an in-depth theoretical understanding of issues surrounding religious disclosure in the medical visit and expand the discussion on health care providers’ personal and professional privacy boundaries as documented by Petronio and Sargent (2011). Implications for health care training and practice are discussed.

Antitrust Damages Actions: Obtaining Probative Evidence in the Hands of Another Party

To support an antitrust damages claim a private litigant will seek to rely on documents that are not in his possession. In the absence of any specific EU rules on disclosure, however, a private litigant established in one Member State may be disfavoured as compared to a private litigant established in another. In seeking to establish a common approach to document disclosure, the EU institutions recently agreed upon the Damages Directive. At its core, the Damages Directive provides that national courts should, as a matter of principle, be able to order the disclosure of evidence, whether in the hands of the defendant or claimant, or included in the file of a competition authority. With respect to the latter, in particular, national rules implementing the Damages Directive must ensure that leniency statements and settlement submissions are never disclosed. It would seem that the Pfleiderer case law is no longer applicable to these two categories of documents, but continues to be applicable in other areas. The Damages Directive does not answer all the questions that will come before a judge faced with a request for disclosure, but marks a significant step towards facilitating the bringing of antitrust damages actions in the EU.

Addressing failures of environmental information disclosure through administrative lawsuits in China: the paradox of legal mobilization

In China, the new open government information legislation entered into force in 2008, which has provided the basis for the public to invoke the law to request government agencies to disclose environmental information. During this process, administrative litigation has been utilized by the public as a means to rectify their failures of obtaining environmental information through disclosure request. Treating this process as a legal mobilization, this article analyzes the complexities of access to government information from a socio-legal perspective. It aims to understand the paradox that citizens and entities actively initiate such litigation despite the fact that a successful result is not likely to be achieved through such lawsuits. In outlining the role of citizens and entities, including environmental organizations and law firms, this article argues that administrative litigation has been used as a legal strategy by both citizens and entities not only to obtain the information but also to impose pressure upon government agencies to adapt to the new open government information mechanism. Empowered by law, citizens and entities have been transposed from passive subjects to direct activists in the process, and have created changes in both the political process and the legal development of government information disclosure.

Public Disclosure of Medicare Payments to Individual Physicians

Public disclosure of individual physician payment data has been advocated as a powerful tool to control health care costs and to improve the delivery of care—and criticized as invading clinicians’ privacy. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced that it would modify its long-standing policy to routinely deny requests for the disclosure of the amounts that had been paid to individual physicians under the Medicare program.1 Instead, as of March 18, 2014, CMS, as a result of a recent court decision and the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, “will make case-by-case determinations” that “weigh the balance between the privacy interest of individual physicians and the public interest in disclosure of such information.” The identities of patients will not be revealed.2

Embezzlement disclosure request and information asymmetry between individual and institutional investors

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the effect of embezzlement disclosure requests as well as the information asymmetry among investors for the firms listed on the Korea Exchange. Firms that receive an embezzlement disclosure request exhibit an abnormal return of -8.41% on the request day, an abnormal return of -2.16% on the following day, and a cumulative abnormal return of about -20% leading to the disclosure request. This result confirms that embezzlement is materially bad news, causing substantial loss to the investors. Furthermore, individual investors show net purchases on firms prior to embezzlement disclosure requests while institutional investors show net sales, suggesting that the information asymmetry exists between individual and institutional investors prior to embezzlement disclosure requests causing individual investors trade with institutional investors at an informational disadvantage.

Insights from Global Environmental Governance

Transparency is a widely used concept in debates on international politics, from transnational anti-corruption campaigns to renewed requests for greater disclosure on health, finance, or even security issues. Calls for transparency date back at least to the League of Nations, when internationalists demanded open diplomacy. Yet, it is in the subfield of GEG, and its developments on nonstate actors as a key research topic (see introduction), where the practice and theory of transparency has made the most profound inroads (Gupta 2010a). GEG has been a particularly fertile ground for the development of informational governance (Mol 2008) and the rise of numerous transparency initiatives which have been analyzed in a rapidly developing literature. Importantly, current GEG research is also highly relevant for other IR subfields. For one, recent GEG research can help IR scholars to further refine the concept of transparency and to increase conceptual clarity and sophistication. Second, research on GEG has improved our understanding of the factors that determine the effectiveness of transparency as a governance tool in international politics.

It's a real privilege: common interests in trust disputes

This article looks at the application of common interest privilege in trust disputes, specifically where the privilege is claimed between trustees and beneficiaries. It analyses recent developments, in particular the recent judgment of Briggs J in Singla v Stockler, in which he found that the privilege can arise by agreement, by implication from the relationship between the parties or, a significantly, by virtue of the mutual conduct between the parties. This latter test has potentially widened the application of the privilege and may impact on trustees’ ability to resist disclosure requests from beneficiaries in certain circumstances.

When the Topic is You: Genetic Counselor Responses to Prenatal Patients’ Requests for Self-Disclosure

A limited amount of research indicates patient requests play a major role in genetic counselors' self-disclosure decisions and that disclosure and non-disclosure responses to patient requests may differentially affect genetic counseling processes. Studies further suggest patient requests may be more common in prenatal settings, particularly when counselors are pregnant. Empirical evidence is limited however, concerning the nature of patient requests. This study explored genetic counselors' experiences of prenatal patients' requests for self-disclosure. Four major research questions were: (1) What types of questions do prenatal patients ask that invite self-disclosure?; (2) Do pregnant genetic counselors have unique experiences with prenatal patient disclosure requests?; (3) How do genetic counselors typically respond to disclosure requests?; and (4) What strategies are effective and ineffective in responding to disclosure requests? One hundred seventy-six genetic counselors completed an online survey and 40 also participated in telephone interviews. Inductive analysis of 21 interviews revealed patient questions vary, although questions about counselor demographics are most common, and patients are more likely to ask pregnant counselors questions about their personal pregnancy decisions. Participants reported greater discomfort with self-disclosure requests during pregnancy, yet also disclosing more frequently during pregnancy. Counselor responses included personal self-disclosure, professional self-disclosure, redirection, and declining to disclose. Factors perceived as influencing disclosure included: topic, patient motivations, timing of request, quality of counseling relationship, patient characteristics, and ethical/legal responsibilities. Disclosure practices changed over time for most counselors. Additional findings, practice implications, and research recommendations are discussed.

Developing An Econometric Model For Measuring The Evolution Of Information Disclosure - Ias 23 Borrowing Costs -

According to the disclosure requests of IAS 23 Borrowing Costs, companies are to include the following elements within their annual reports: accounting policies adopted by the firms, value of capitalization for borrowing costs and capitalization rate. This paper involves an empirical research, presenting the correlation that might exist at the level of compliance with IAS 23 and specific variables that characterize the activity of a company. The purpose of our investigation is to estimate and determine a statistic function that should connect disclosure index measured for IAS 23 requests and a series of elements, namely: country of origin, total assets, turnover, ROA, ROE, debt rate and solvency. The research methodology assumes disclosure index determination and SPSS analysis. The findings suggest evidence of correlation with respect to the level of compliance in information disclosure and the mentioned variables.

Recent decision of the Swiss Federal Administrative Court and its implications for the future of trusts in Switzerland

In its decision dated 18 March 2011, the Swiss Federal Administrative Court delivered a landmark ruling on characterization of rights of beneficiaries of a discretionary trust governed by a foreign law. The Court considered whether a bank account held in the name of trustees with UBS AG was within the ambit of a disclosure request received from the US Government investigating unpaid tax. Notwithstanding the fact that the plaintiff was within the class of objects/beneficiaries named in the trust instrument the court ruled that since the beneficiary/object had no control over the assets and income of the trust, he should not be treated as the beneficial owner of assets owned by the trust. In reaching its conclusion the Swiss Federal Administrative Court relied on the ratification in 2007 of the Hague Convention on the Law Applicable to Trusts and on Their Recognition and confirmed the wide recognition of the institution of trust in the Swiss legal order.