Legislation in different jurisdictions

Question: How do we deal with multiple legislations in a single jurisdiction?

Are there any jurisdictions with two or more information freedom laws, that have sufficiently substantive differences for this to need to be encoded in software?

In eastern/central Europe, Tony says "I think there are substantial enough differences in some countries when you're asking for Soviet-era secret police files. I suspect there are lots of other cases too, but I don't know yet how important it is that it's not just a matter of making it clear in the request."

Below is the start of a list of possible distinctions by country.

UK

In the UK, we have two relevant bits of legislation: FOI and EIR (links to England/Wales/NI versions; we treat all UK jurisdictions the same). EIR is about environmental data, and FOI about other kinds of data. The distinction is not important to the vast majority of our end users. EIR covers more authorities than FOI.

It was only introduced in code for bodies which are subject to EIR only (not FOI), and which are tagged eir_only. The distinction is not meaningful in terms of how the request is handled, only in terms of the copy presented to the user and/or authority (boilerplate text in the email request, for example). To simplify this, we could just let the authority decide under which (if any) legislation they are acting for their own purposes (just a tag).

In short, the distinction in the UK could be dropped altogether, in favour of letting authorities reject something as not being something they are subject to. If we wanted to fully support it, we could model it in the data as a many-to-many relationship between laws and authorities, but wouldn't want to expose this to the end user as a choice, ever

Ireland

In ROI, FOI requests are chargeable, but EIRs are not. Having said this, John Handelaar is of the opinion that we shouldn't support chargeable FOI requests on principle.

New Zealand

The respective laws are called OIA and LGOIMA.

Rowan needed to add in "law" and "category" entities to support his requirements.