“Information Belongs to the People”: Article 68 and the Access-to-Information Law Egypt Has Awaited Since 2014

It is a scene that repeats itself every morning on the second floor of a government building in some Egyptian city or other: a man has been standing at a small glass window since the doors opened. He came to ask about something simple: a copy of a decision concerning his family’s land, a figure showing how much had been paid in fees, or a date telling him how far his paperwork had got. The clerk behind the window says the line every Egyptian who has ever stood in a queue knows by heart: “That’s internal data… mish min haqqak ti’raf” — you have no right to know. The man leaves, not because he is convinced, but because he does not know that there is a document that outranks every piece of paper in that building, and that it says the exact opposite, word for word.

Before we go on, a necessary clarification. This article is about the citizen’s right to obtain the information the state holds: decisions, statistics, documents and figures. The other side of the coin — the citizen’s right to protect his personal data from leaks or exploitation — has its own law, and its own separate article on this platform. The first throws open the state’s cabinet to the people; the second locks the people’s cabinet against anyone with no right to open it. The two are faces of a single dignity.

Let us start with the text, because it is the strongest part of the story. Article 68 of the 2014 Constitution states that “information, data, statistics and official documents belong to the people, and their disclosure from their various sources is a right the state guarantees to every citizen; the state is obliged to provide them and make them available to citizens transparently.” The article goes on to say that it is the law that “regulates the rules for obtaining them, making them available and keeping them confidential, the rules for their deposit and preservation, and appeals against refusal to provide them, and sets the penalty for withholding information or deliberately giving false information.” It closes by obliging state institutions to deposit their official documents, once no longer in use, at the National Archives (Dar al-Wathaiq al-Qawmiya), and to protect, restore and digitise them.

Read that word again: “belong”. The Constitution does not say information is “available” to the people, or that it is “granted” to them on request; it says it is theirs to begin with, and that the state is its custodian, not its owner. That turns the scene at the window on its head: the man asking for a copy of the decision is not asking for a favour, he is claiming what is his, and the clerk who says “you have no right” is standing — perhaps without knowing it — on the wrong side of the text of the country’s highest document, even if the practical road to that right is still waiting for the law. More important still, the Constitution did not stop at declaring the right; it promised a penalty for anyone who withholds information or deliberately gives false information.

But this is where the gap between text and life opens up. The same article says that “the law regulates” the rules, the appeals and the penalty — that is, the Constitution drew the right and left it to the legislator to build the road to it: who submits the request, to whom, within how many days it must be answered, what is exempt, and where the citizen complains if his request is refused. To the best of our knowledge, and as of the time of writing, that law has still not been issued, and twelve years have passed since the Constitution. That is why the man stands at the window with a full right in his pocket, and no map to show him the door.

The attempts have not stopped, and that should be said in fairness. In 2013, to the best of our knowledge, the Ministry of Justice prepared a first draft of a freedom-of-information law, and human-rights groups prepared a parallel bill in the same period. In October 2017, the Supreme Council for Media Regulation published its own draft, in several chapters: it affirms every citizen’s right to obtain information, obliges every public body to appoint an information officer to carry out its obligations, proposes the creation of a Supreme Council for Information, and sets a fine of between 3,000 and 10,000 Egyptian pounds for anyone who refuses to provide data without justification or provides false data, while exempting national-security data and industrial and commercial secrets from disclosure — as set out in its published text.

Then 2023 brought the file back to the fore. In early June of that year, the National Council for Human Rights held a workshop entitled “Freedom of Access to Information: Between Constitutional Entitlement and Challenges”, and stressed the importance of issuing the law as a constitutional right enshrined in Article 68 — as reported by the State Information Service on its website. In the same period, the National Dialogue discussed the law among its papers. In other words, state institutions, and not rights advocates alone, speak of the law as an entitlement that is beyond dispute in principle; all the dispute is in the details.

The most recent chapters were written this year. On 16 April 2026, the House of Representatives’ Media, Culture and Antiquities Committee discussed giving effect to freedom of information and recommended working towards a comprehensive law; the Minister of State for Information told the committee that the government intends to issue the law and urged MPs to take the initiative and table a bill on the matter, without an announced timetable. In the final week of the first session of the third legislative term, MPs tabled a bill that adopted a draft prepared by the Journalists’ Syndicate, Egypt’s press union; according to published reports it gathered the signatures of sixty MPs, and it relies explicitly on Article 68 and proposes penalties for public officials who deliberately refuse to provide information or provide inaccurate data. We have not seen its full text, so we do not go into its provisions. And on 31 August 2026, during an expanded meeting with the ministries’ official spokespeople and media advisers, the Minister of State for Information said work was continuing to speed up the issuance of the law, without setting a date.

Why does all this matter now? For two reasons that converge within days of each other. First, on 28 September the United Nations marks the International Day for Universal Access to Information, a day proclaimed by UNESCO in 2015 and adopted by the General Assembly in 2019, with a single idea behind it: public information is a right, not a favour. Second, the House of Representatives opens the second session of its third legislative term in October, under Article 115 of the Constitution, which requires the President of the Republic to convene it before the first Thursday of the month; if no summons is issued, it convenes by force of the Constitution on that date. The bill tabled at the end of the last session will be among the files awaiting it.

Let us come down from parliament to the window and ask the practical question: what would a law like this change in the life of the man who walked away without his document? The Egyptian drafts we have seen revolve, for the most part, around four things that access-to-information laws around the world have in common. That every public body has a named official responsible for answering information requests, so that the citizen is not passed from office to office. A fixed deadline for a response, as most access laws in the world provide, so that silence itself becomes a refusal that can be appealed. A body the citizen can complain to if his request is refused. And a clear penalty for deliberate withholding and for false information — the penalty the Constitution itself demanded.

The law has another face that is rarely mentioned: it protects the official before it holds him to account. The person who says “you have no right to know” today does not always do so in bad faith, but because he has no written rule telling him what may be handed over and what may not, so he chooses refusal because it is the safest option for him. In fairness, the drafts we have seen, from 2013 to 2026, retained exemptions for national security and for industrial and commercial secrets, as access laws do in most countries of the world. This article is not the place to assess those exemptions; it is the place to recall that the Constitution itself asked for the “rules of confidentiality” to be written into a law, not left to the discretion of each window separately, and for the citizen to have a route to appeal a refusal, whatever its reason.

Until the law is issued, the citizen is not without recourse. He can put his request in writing, have it entered in the office’s incoming-correspondence register and keep the entry number; cite the text of Article 68 in it; and, if his request is refused verbally, file a written complaint with the head of the body or through the government’s complaints portals. These are not complete tools, but they turn “you have no right to know” from words spoken at a window into a documented incident with a date and a number.

In the evening, the man goes home without the document he came for, but perhaps with something else, if he has read these lines: that what he asked for was neither curiosity nor prying, and that the Constitution the state has hung on its walls wrote his name — his, and that of everyone with him in the queue — as the owner of that information. And when the House of Representatives opens its session in October, among its papers will be a bill that answers the question this man has been asking for twelve years: when will the word at the heart of Article 68 become a rule at every window, and not just a word in a book?