Maldives

Name of law: Right to Information Act
First adopted: 2014
Last modified: n/a
RTI Rating last updated: 2023-09
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Introduction

Like many States in South Asia, the Maldives has quite a strong RTI law with beneficial features across the board. It is broad in scope, covering all three branches of government and private entities performing public functions or receiving public funding. It is less strong in terms of procedures, partly due to requirements to provide excessive information to make requests, which are also not sufficiently simple to lodge. However, the regime of exceptions contains unduly vague grounds for refusing to provide information, along with exceptions that lack a harm-test, and largely preserves exceptions found in other laws, although it does have a good public interest override. The law gets a nearly perfect score for its very strong system of appeals, which establishes both an internal appeal and an external one to an independent administrative oversight body. The law gets a perfect score for sanctions and protections and also does very well in terms of and promotional measures.
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