Information of a public nature (IJZ) is information that arises from the field of work of the person required to provide it, exists in a material form and does not fall within the exemptions under the Access to Public Information Act (ZDIJZ). The Information Commissioner (IP) plays a key role as an appeal body in obtaining PII. The aim of this thesis is to present the importance of access to PII in democratic societies, the historical development of this right, the hierarchy of application of the rules and to include the perspective of the Information Commissioner, mainly through his practice in the analysis of annual reports.
Different methods were used: normative to define the rules, comparative to study EU rules, descriptive to define the concepts and analysis to study the decisions of the Information Commissioner. The analysis of the annual reports of the IP revealed that complaints of silence by the authority remain worryingly high, accounting for 41.4% of all complaints in 2020. Despite a slight decrease in 2021, the trend continued in 2022, indicating persistent problems in the functioning of public authorities. I used the method of analysis to analyse the hierarchy of the use of rules in the Information Commissioner's decisions.
In addition, the analysis of court decisions showed that the principle that special laws prevail over general ones applies to access to information. Thus, the IHRA operates as a fundamental law, but its application is limited when special laws regulate and protect certain information that takes precedence
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