Freedom of Information Article 35 (FOI)Freedom of Information Article 35 (FOI)
Produced by the Freedom of Information officeAuthored by States of Jersey and published on
13 February 2019.Prepared internally, no external costs.
Request
With regards to the Article 35 exemption of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011, I would like to know, since the inception of the Law , the following including the case references:
A
How many times has the Scheduled Public Authority (SPA) considered the Article 35 Formulation and development of policies exemption?
B
How many times has the SPA found in favour of disclosure?
C
How many times has the SPA found in favour of non disclosure?
D
How many times has this been appealed after a non disclosure decision?
E
How many times has the initial non disclosure decision been over turned?
F
How many times has this gone to the Information Commissioner and what where the results ?
Response
Please note that case references are unique identifiers applied for the use of individual requesters and will not be disclosed. In data protection terminology they are deemed part of an individual’s personal data and should not be released.
A to C
Statistics in relation to FOI are held by the Central Freedom of Information Unit (CFU). Scheduled Public Authorities would not necessarily record all articles that have been considered for a response and this information is not held centrally.
The CFU do record when an Article has been applied to a final response.
Article 35 has been applied to Freedom of Information (FOI) responses 43 times since the implementation of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 (the Law).
A breakdown per year can be seen below:
| 2015 | 6 |
| 2016 | 13 |
| 2017 | 12 |
| 2018 | 12 |
It should be noted that in 72% of cases Article 35 has only been applied to part of the request.
D
Requests to which Article 35 has been applied have been taken to Internal Review eight times. It should be noted that other exemptions may have been applied to these requests.
E
The decision to apply Article 35 has been upheld in seven cases. In the remaining case Article 35 was dropped as an exemption due to the change in circumstances of the request.
F
Two instances of the use of Article 35 were appealed to the Office of the Information Commissioner (OIC). The use of Article 35 was upheld by the Information Commissioner. The decision notices of the Information Commissioner can be found through the following link:
Decision notice of 4 October 2018
gov.je