Malaysia Wants a Freedom of Information Law. It's Not Enough

Key Takeaways

• Yesterday, September 28th, was the International Day for Universal Access to Information — a UNESCO observance recognizing access to information as a foundation of accountable government.
• Malaysia's first federal Freedom of Information bill received its first reading in July 2026 and has been referred to a Parliamentary Special Select Committee; the Center for Law and Democracy's assessment gave it 47 out of 150 points under its Right to Information Rating methodology.
• Civil society organizations including ARTICLE 19, the Center for Independent Journalism, and the Center to Combat Corruption and Cronyism are calling for the bill to be strengthened into an enforceable right-to-know act before it passes.
• The same secrecy culture the bill is meant to address is on live display in the Najib Razak pardon case, where the documents governing a politically sensitive house arrest arrangement haven't been disclosed.
• A freedom of information law is only as useful as the records it provides access to — and most frameworks say little about whether those records must be preserved and remain reachable.

Yesterday was the International Day for Universal Access to Information. Malaysia's parliament is currently considering the country's first federal Freedom of Information bill — which makes this a meaningful date to examine what the bill actually offers, and what it doesn't.

The bill received its first reading in July 2026 and was referred to a Parliamentary Special Select Committee following civil society objections. The Center for Law and Democracy subsequently assessed it under its Right to Information Rating methodology, giving it 47 out of 150 points.

That score reflects specific gaps: the bill doesn't make disclosure the default with secrecy the exception, doesn't establish an independent oversight body with the power to order disclosure, doesn't require proactive publication of public-interest information, and doesn't prevent existing secrecy laws — including the Official Secrets Act — from overriding it.

Those aren't minor technical deficiencies. They're the load-bearing elements of any functional transparency framework. A law that lets agencies refuse requests without an independent body empowered to overrule them, and that can be neutralized by older secrecy provisions, is a law that performs transparency without delivering it.

The Pardon That Shows the Problem

The abstract case for a stronger FOI law has a very concrete illustration running in parallel. The conditional pardon of former Prime Minister Najib Razak — including a house arrest arrangement that replaced his prison sentence — has generated significant public controversy, and the documents governing it haven't been disclosed.

The Pardons Board minutes haven't been published. The Attorney General's submission to the board hasn't been released. The full conditions governing the house arrest, the legal basis for implementing it, the mechanisms for monitoring compliance, and the public expenditure associated with the arrangement are all unknown. Civil society groups are asking not whether the pardon power exists — it does, constitutionally — but whether the public can scrutinize how it was exercised. The answer, under current arrangements, is no.

That's not a separate issue from the FOI bill. It's the same issue. Malaysia is considering transparency legislation at the same moment its government is making decisions of profound public interest behind a wall of secrecy, and the two facts illuminate each other. A FOI law that leaves existing secrecy provisions intact wouldn't have changed any of it.

The Half of Access That the Law Doesn't Cover

There's a dimension of access to information that FOI frameworks almost never address, and that the observance this day marks doesn't fully capture either. The right to request a record is not the same thing as a commitment that the record will exist when you ask for it.

We've been writing about this problem from a different angle. Digital preservation — the work of keeping public records reachable over time — is mostly done by nonprofits and volunteers operating without a public mandate or stable funding. Sites close. Links break. Platforms shut down and take their content with them. The material most likely to vanish is the material nobody was resourced to maintain: local government pages, small publications, the working documentation of bodies that have since been restructured.

That's frequently the exact material an accountability question turns on. A government's published position from two years ago. A regulatory decision. A public statement made before a policy changed. The right to request it is only meaningful if it's still there to be found.

Malaysia's proposed FOI law, even if strengthened to meet international standards, would give citizens the right to ask. It would say very little about whether what they're asking about has been preserved. Most FOI frameworks share that gap. It doesn't make the right less worth fighting for — it makes it worth extending once it's won.

What a Meaningful Framework Would Look Like

The civil society organizations calling for a stronger bill have been specific. Disclosure should be the rule, secrecy the exception, with exemptions based on demonstrable harm and a strong public-interest override.

An independent FOI Commission should have the power to review refusals, order disclosure, and monitor implementation. The law should require proactive disclosure of documents of significant public interest. And it should apply to the parliamentary process that's revising it — submissions, recommendations, and the revised bill should be public.

Those aren’t radical demands. They describe the standard that well-functioning FOI regimes in comparable democracies already meet. Malaysia scoring 47 out of 150 against that standard means there's a long distance between the bill that was tabled and the law those standards describe.

The International Day for Universal Access to Information exists to affirm that the public should be able to find out what institutions do in their name. In Malaysia right now, a pardon arrangement of major public interest is undocumented, and the law meant to guarantee transparency would score near the bottom of international benchmarks if passed as written. That's the distance between the observance and the reality — and it's the distance the Parliamentary Special Select Committee has the opportunity to close.