Of course certain areas are protected - defence, foreign relations, law enforcement, commercial confidentiality, personal privacy, and cabinet documents - but outside the exempted areas, a vital democratic principle would finally have been established: that whenever information is withheld, governments should be required to justify their secrecy.
They found that for every aid dollar unexpectedly withheld, government investment fell by 12 cents, while government consumption remained stable.
Britain just 'found' another 170,000 unlawfully withheld government files.
O'Brien worked on ministers' special advisers, exploiting an awareness that Osborne had power to give or withhold government jobs.
He downplays the heterogeneity within these groups, perhaps in order to bolster his solution for reconciliation: sanctioning "public manifestations of religion," while withholding government funding from religious institutions.
Mr. Downer made Mr. Volcker's investigation more difficult, according to testimony before the Australian commission, initially barring government officials from testifying and withholding government cables.
We must avoid the situation where we have only two options – either to withhold government money, or have folks get bonuses, with the capacity to sue the government and get even more out of the legal system".
Some two dozen state and local governments, including New York City, have enacted similar "selective purchasing" laws that effectively withhold government contracts from companies that do business in Myanmar or other countries, including Nigeria, Tibet, Indonesia and Cuba.
Israeli Arab activists have also pledged to carry on marking Nakba Day in the face of planned legislation that would withhold government money from institutions that fund activity deemed detrimental to the state.
Brazil's regime developed over 15 years and involved tightening up its code on economic activity in forested areas, moratoriums on sales of food grown on cleared land, a new land registry, withholding government-subsidised credit from areas with the worst deforestation and strengthening law enforcement through the public prosecutor's office.
"After promising not to withhold government information over 'speculative or abstract fears,' the Obama administration has concluded it will not publicly disclose federal records that could shed light on the security of the government's health care website because doing so could 'potentially' allow hackers to break in.
