Government Transparency In Iceland Declining

Iceland now ranks towards the bottom for government transparency among developed nations with laws in place to guarantee access to public information, reports Vísir.

According to new research by the World Wide Web Foundation, Iceland’s low rank comes down to weak implementation of the laws in place to allow public data access.

“There are a lot of countries that have promised to put this basic data out there, really valuable information to cement trust between the government and citizens, but a lot of them haven’t followed up,” Sir Tim Berners-Lee, whose organisation compiled the table, told the BBC.

Eighty-six countries were assessed for how easy their governments make it for state information to be analysed.

Iceland dropped 14 places down to 27th place in the rankings compared with last year. However, the research does stipulate that the drop is in part due to correcting for some over-scoring of dataset openness in Iceland in 2013.

The UK came first and the US and Sweden came second and third in the rankings.