Toby Mendel is the Executive Director of the Centre for Law and Democracy, a Canadian-based international human rights NGO that focuses on providing legal expertise regarding foundational rights for democracy, including the right to information, freedom of expression, the right to participate and the rights to assembly and association. Prior to that he was for 12 years Senior Director for Law at ARTICLE 19, a human rights NGO focusing on freedom of expression and the right to information. He has provided peak level expertise on these rights to a wide range of actors including the World Bank, various UN and other intergovernmental bodies, and numerous governments and NGOs in countries all over the world. Before joining ARTICLE 19, he worked as a senior human rights consultant with Oxfam Canada and as a human rights policy analyst at the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). He has published extensively on a range of freedom of expression, right to information, communication rights and refugee issues, including comparative legal and analytical studies on public service broadcasting, the right to information and broadcast policy.
The OGP has quickly become the leading global movement for promoting government openness. So it might seem odd to ask whether something as central to openness as the right to information (RTI or freedom of information) is being taken seriously within the OGP. Unfortunately, early indications suggest that the question is all too relevant. RTI