The Right to Access Information: Between a Service Input and a Pillar of Accountability   – A reading of information’s place within Jordan’s administrative modernization project

Digital transformation projects in Jordan’s public administration are accelerating as one of the pillars of the administrative modernization project. Yet digitizing a closed bureaucracy does not necessarily produce openness – it may instead produce an administration more efficient at controlling the flow of information than at making it available. The issue here is not about the speed of service delivery or the multiplicity of electronic platforms, but about the very position the right to access information occupies within the modernization project: is this right treated as an oversight tool the citizen holds over the performance and accountability of authority, or merely as a technical input used to improve service quality and speed up delivery? This distinction is precisely where the paradox governing the course of administrative modernization in Jordan lies. The right to access information has been incorporated among the tools for developing government performance, while its original function of strengthening accountability has remained constrained by a legislative and institutional structure decades older than the modernization project itself.

Since the public-sector modernization roadmap was launched at the end of July 2022,[1] it has rested on seven core components aiming to achieve thirty-three strategic goals over a full decade, through three successive implementation phases led by government services, procedures, and digitization. Within this framework, the right to information appears primarily as fuel for smoother service delivery, not as a tool the citizen holds to monitor and hold authority accountable.[2] Transparency, which should be the natural fruit of this right, is thereby reduced to a subsidiary function of service quality rather than an independent goal in its own right. This reduction governs the performance of the entire system, including the governance component, which linked the review of the ethical charter and codes of professional conduct to concepts of transparency and integrity as tools of self-accountability within the government apparatus, more than as a framework for external oversight of it.[3]

Legislative Leadership and Limits in the Exercise of the Right

At the legislative level, Jordan holds a genuine head start worth recording: it was the first Arab country to pass a law guaranteeing the right to access information, under Law No. 47 of 2007, before eight other Arab states followed with similar laws, the most recent being Qatar in 2022.[4] The most significant amendment to this law came under Law No. 3 of 2024, passed by the National Assembly in March of that year, which introduced substantive changes aimed at speeding up response procedures and expanding the periodic publication of information. The amendment shortened the response period for requests from thirty to fifteen working days, extendable once by ten days for justified reasons, and treated failure to respond within this period as an implicit rejection subject to appeal. It also exempted from the scope of confidentiality information related to human rights violations, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.[5] These are genuine procedural reforms that should not be underestimated, yet they left the restrictive structure underlying the right itself unchanged.

The deeper constraint lies not in the time limit but in the logic of the exceptions themselves. Article 12 of the amended law (previously Article 13 before the 2024 amendment) obliges officials to withhold a broad range of information defined in loose terms, referring in essence back to the State Documents and Secrets Protection Law No. 50 of 1971 – legislation issued under exceptional circumstances more than fifty-five years ago, which in no way reflects modern concepts of the right to information and open governance. More seriously, the classification system tied to this law remains ambiguous in application – in terms of who is authorized to classify information, how long confidentiality applies, and what appeal channels exist for those harmed by such classification. This ambiguity turns the exception into a practical rule rather than the narrowly bounded exception the legal principle underlying this right presumes. Compounding this, since the Personal Data Protection Law No. 24 of 2023 came into force, an additional legislative layer now prohibits disclosure of certain data, further widening the space of exception at the expense of the right’s actual scope, in the very same context that was supposed to expand it.[6]

When Governance Structures Undermine the Independence of the Right

Institutional dysfunction is no less significant than legislative dysfunction in weakening the practical impact of this right. Jordan’s Information Commissioner is not an independent, standalone body; rather, this function is carried out by the Director General of the National Library Department in addition to his original post. As for the Information Council, which is responsible for ensuring that information requesters are provided with the information they seek and for reviewing and settling complaints related to such requests, it is chaired by the Minister of Culture, with the Information Commissioner serving as its vice-chair. The Council also includes a number of senior government officials, among them the secretaries-general of the Ministries of Justice, Interior, Government Communication, and Digital Economy and Entrepreneurship, alongside representatives of other institutions and bodies added to its composition under the 2024 amendment. This composition means that the institutional mechanism tasked with reviewing grievances related to access to information does not enjoy full institutional independence from the executive branch – raising a fundamental question about its capacity to exercise an effective and independent oversight role vis-à-vis the government bodies that hold the information.

This gap between the legislative head start and actual performance is reflected in international indicators. Although Jordan was the first country to join the Open Government Partnership in 2011, it ranks relatively low on the global Right to Information Rating (RTI Rating) among countries with similar legislation – a gap that reflects the distance between the formal quality of the legal text guaranteeing the right and the actual level of its implementation on the ground.[7]

Digitizing the Front End while Preserving an Insulated Administrative Structure

Here the contradiction governing the relationship between administrative modernization and the right to access information becomes clear: the modernization track digitizes the state’s front end – from electronic portals to remote services – while the back end remains governed by an administrative culture older, in its commitment to secrecy, than the right itself. Digitizing a closed bureaucracy does not necessarily produce openness; it may instead produce an opacity that is faster and more efficiently managed. This paradox intersects with a broader criticism directed at the public-sector modernization roadmap itself: that despite the procedural progress it has achieved, it still lacks a systematic framework linking reform initiatives to impact, and a performance and measurement system that converts these initiatives into trackable, accountable results. This diagnosis applies literally to the file of the right to access information: outputs are measured – such as the number of electronic portals launched – rather than outcomes, such as the actual volume of information released and the quality of justification given for rejection decisions.

From Procedural Reform to Rebuilding the Information Access System

Comparative best practices in this field point to a clear path if reform of this right is to be substantive rather than merely formal. The first is replacing the broad categorical exceptions in the 1971 law with a harm test coupled with a public-interest test, interpreted narrowly and placing the burden of proof on the administration rather than the information requester. The second is imposing defined time limits for lifting confidentiality from documents and periodic review of their classification, instead of leaving classification open-ended indefinitely. The third is adopting proactive disclosure as the default and secrecy as the exception to it, through open data that can be processed digitally rather than mere formal postings on electronic portals. The fourth is addressing the 1971 law itself, either by repealing it or substantively aligning it with international standards for the right to access information, since any reform of the law guaranteeing this right remains practically limited in effect as long as the older law continues to overshadow and constrain it.

In sum, Jordan possesses a legislative structure relatively advanced compared with its regional surroundings in the field of the right to access information, yet it continues to manage this right with a mindset that treats it as a tool for improving service quality more than as a pillar for balancing power. Unless this right is treated as an oversight and accountability tool the citizen holds over the state’s performance – rather than merely a means used to embellish that performance – the administrative modernization project is likely to produce a state that is more operationally efficient, but not necessarily one more open to those it serves.

Yet this challenge is not without a solution. Jordan is not starting from zero on this issue, since the three modernization visions – political, economic, and administrative – were never framed as separate tracks, but as a single system meant to bring together improved performance, wider participation, and the entrenchment of the rule of law. This is echoed in royal directives that have repeatedly stressed that administrative modernization is not an end in itself, but a means of building trust between citizens and the state. In other words, linking the right to access information to its oversight function does not conflict with the current modernization path – it is a natural extension of it, and a fulfillment of its deeper purpose: that transparency be a condition for public trust in the state, not merely a formal procedure added on the margins. Completing the four reform tracks outlined above, then, is not a departure from the administrative modernization path, but its natural next step: turning the efficiency tools built over recent years into tools of balance as well – so that the Jordanian state becomes not only more efficient in how it operates, but more open and accountable to those it serves.

[1] The Public Sector Modernization Roadmap was officially launched on July 31, 2022.

[2] The thirty-three strategic objectives are distributed across seven pillars: government services and business facilitation, procedures and digitization, organizational structure and governance, policy-making and decision-making, human resources, legislation, and institutional culture — implemented through three phases extending until the end of the decade.

[3] According to what the Jordan News Agency (Petra) reported regarding the pillars of the public sector modernization roadmap and its governance pillar.

[4] This leading position was confirmed by multiple sources, including the Jordanian Minister of Culture and the Jordan News Agency (Petra), in addition to specialized legal studies on the subject of the law.

[5] Amending Law No. 3 of 2024, published in Official Gazette Issue No. 5916, dated 24/3/2024.

[6] Law No. 50 of 1971 (Law on the Protection of State Secrets and Documents), published in the Official Gazette dated 1/8/1971; and the Personal Data Protection Law No. 24 of 2023, published in Official Gazette Issue No. 5881, dated 17/9/2023.

[7] Jordan joined the Open Government Partnership (OGP) in 2011 as a founding member, while specialized readings of the RTI Rating index indicate a decline in Jordan’s ranking despite the seniority of its legislation; the exact ranking figure warrants direct verification from the index’s database when preparing a final version for publication.