If you live near where the information is held (for example you live in the capital where the documents are kept), you can also ask to inspect original documents. This can be helpful when researching information that might be held in a large number of documents that you’d like to have a look through. Such inspection should be free of charge and should be arranged at a time that is reasonable and convenient for you.

We advise you to make your request in writing and to save a copy or a record of it so that in the future you are able to demonstrate that your request was sent, in case you need to make an appeal against failure to answer, for example. This also gives you some evidence of submitting the request if you are planning to do a story on it.

If you write or broadcast a story that the request has been submitted, it can put pressure on the public institution to process and respond to the request. You can update the information as and when you get a response to the request – or if the deadline passes and there is no response you can make this into a news story as well. Doing this has the additional benefit of educating members of the public about the right of access to information and how it works in practice.

Find out about appeals in advance, including the time-frame for presenting an appeal. If you are not sure what to do for the first stage of appeal, contact the office of your Information Commission/Commissioner or Ombudsman and they will be able to help you. If you don’t have such a body, try phoning the institution which issued the refusal and asking them. If you still are having problems, then contact the Legal Leaks Help Desk about it and we will try to help you, for example, by giving you the contact of an NGO or lawyer in the country.

The refusal to release information following a request is often a story in itself. Be creative and constructive with the fact that the information was refused, get examples from other countries, ask experts what they already know, discuss the public interest in the information and try to use the story to press for greater transparency.

If you have been refused information that you wanted for a story you are working on, it might help to state in your internal administrative appeal that the information is needed for a media story and to state that there is a public interest in knowing that information. It’s also important at this point to refer to your rights under the access to information law and/or constitution. (Of course, if you don’t want the public authority to know you are working on a story, then don’t mention it).

Once you have drafted the first internal administrative appeal with references to the law and your rights, just keep the letter in your computer and you’ll find that you have a template for future appeals. That will save you time as it should only need a little bit of changing depending on the content of the other requests.

If you are finding that official spokespersons are angry at you for using the access to information law, then talk to the Legal Leaks team and/or your local access to information organisation or journalists’ association. These NGOs might be able to raise your concerns and perhaps organise a training session for spokespersons to explain journalist’s rights under the law. They should also be able to support you in your discussions with government about giving proper treatment to formal access to information requests submitted by journalists.

If your colleagues are sceptical about the value of access to information requests, one of the best ways to convince them is to write a story based on information you obtained using an access to information law. Mentioning in the final article or broadcast piece that you used the law is also recommended as a way of enforcing its value and raising public awareness of the right.

Increasingly requests can be submitted electronically, so it doesn’t matter where you live. Alternatively, if you do not live in the country where you want to submit the request, you can sometimes send the request to the embassy and they should transfer it to the competent public body. You will need to check with the relevant embassy first if they are ready to do this – sometimes the embassy staff will not have been trained in the right to information and if this seems to be the case, it’s safer to submit the request directly to the relevant public body.