1. Using FOI for a cross-border investigation into immigrant detention

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    Posted in Alaveteli, Transparency, WhatDoTheyKnow

    Did you know that Home Office data doesn’t include the reason that individuals have been taken to immigrant detention centres? Or that the UK is the only country in Europe with no limit on how long they can hold someone in such facilities?

    One organisation keeping a careful eye on the situation is Spanish investigative journalism and fact-checking foundation Maldita, whose recent series of articles (in collaboration with Romanian organisation Funky Citizens) also reveals that the detention of Europeans is at its highest level since Brexit, with Romanian, Polish and Lithuanian citizens most represented. 

    Maldita’s project is replete with the stories of those detained in the UK; insights from organisations concerned with migration and data retrieved from Freedom of Information requests to UK authorities — new ones, and ones they discovered in the vast archive of public responses available on our FOI site WhatDoTheyKnow.

    Reading the set of four pieces, it becomes clear that much of the data required to understand the wider picture is either not collected, or has only come into the open thanks to the public’s right to information.

    Happily, when it comes to information from UK authorities, this right is available to those outside the country (despite a threat to this, back in 2020), giving a higher chance that data impossible to source from one end of the equation may be retrieved from the other.

    Mentorship

    We came to work with Maldita thanks to the Journalismfund mentoring programme, through which we offered support and guidance based on our experience around FOI and supporting cross-border investigations (see, for example, the Lost In Europe project). We were happy to provide expertise on navigating the UK’s FOI system, and making introductions to other organisations that would be of help.

    The resulting articles present sobering facts about the quantity and length of detainments, as well as health issues and self harm among detainees. Until reading these, you may not be aware that the UK is the only country where no date has to be given for release — and, as one might imagine, this results in poor mental health among many.

    Investigative journalist Coral García Dorado, Coordinator of Disinformation Investigations for Maldita, told us how our interventions had facilitated their project.

    During the time we worked together, we introduced Maldita to our WhatDoTheyKnow platform and mentored them around the best way of writing FOI requests. “You can’t imagine how important this tool was for us”, says Coral. “It’s something we don’t have in Spain”*.

    An invaluable archive

    Perhaps Coral’s greatest discovery was around how useful a vast archive of existing requests can be. This helped in three ways: 

    → They came across data that had already been requested, and used it in their pieces: 

    “It’s very valuable,” noted Coral, “because sometimes you would just be asking for the same information that others had — and if you put in the request yourself, you’d have to wait some time for them to send you the information. So if someone has already asked for it and the information is there, you don’t have to replicate the same job again.”

    She gave two examples of where they used this approach: “We published incidents of self harm in detention centres. It was requested by one person, and we just picked it up from there.

    “And also thanks to someone who requested it on your tool, we know what the longest amount of time is that someone has been held an immigration removal centre: 1,131 days“. You can see how both of these requests fed into the work in this article.

    → Where a request would have been useful, but was several years old, they replicated it

     “We made a request to the NHS because we saw another person’s one. It’s very useful because maybe you don’t know that this information exists, so you don’t know that this information can be provided, and once you see that, you can use the precise same wording to ask them to send you the updated information.”

    →  They discovered new ideas to explore

    Coral explained that searching the archive using keywords around immigration “gives you an idea of what you can get”

    Different countries, different access 

    Maldita encountered frustrations around getting information from the Spanish authorities — it turned out that getting it from the UK side was more fruitful. 

    “We asked [the Spanish authorities] for information about Spanish people detained in the UK, but in the end, we couldn’t get it – they gave us information about Spanish people in prison,” explained Coral.

    “They didn’t have — or at least they said they didn’t have — information about the number of Spanish citizens detained in an immigration removal centre. But then if we go back to some articles published by all the newspapers, for example, El País in 2021, someone from the government said, ‘We know, at the moment of nine people who entered an immigration removal centre this year’. 

    “So they had this information, but they said they don’t record this kind of information! In the end, we struggled a lot getting information from the Spanish authorities.”

    Other challenges

    This kind of setback can be dispiriting, but it surely helps to share one’s woes with others who can precisely understand them. In the course of their investigations, Maldita spoke to a number of organisations.

    One of these was the Oxford Immigration Observatory, who explained ongoing frustrations around the cohesiveness of data between centres — making it impossible to track detainees if they were moved from one place to another. In turn, this of course makes it more difficult to pin down precise numbers. 

    All worthwhile

    Finally, we asked Coral how the investigation has been received. “It did have impact – I have to say most of all in the UK, from the different organisations helping migrants.”

    She added, “It’s been great working with you, and having access to the tool. So thank you so much.” 

    We return the thanks — it is always a pleasure to facilitate a vital piece of investigative journalism.

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    * In fact, Spain did once have its own functioning Alaveteli site, which closed in the face of challenges around the government’s reluctance to adhere to the spirit of their own Access to Information law.

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    Image: Schumi4ever (CC by-sa/4.0)

  2. Paul Bradshaw and WhatDoTheyKnow

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    Posted in Transparency, WhatDoTheyKnow, WhatDoTheyKnow (only)

    Paul Bradshaw’s name is well known to those working around data and journalism in the UK. He has authored and contributed to several books on the topic, leads an MA in Data Journalism at Birmingham City University, and acts as a consultant in BBC England’s data unit.

    In mySociety’s twentieth anniversary year, we’re looking to see where we’ve had impact, and in a recent conversation with Paul we were pleased when he noted that WhatDoTheyKnow was a something of a catalyst to his work around Freedom of Information for journalism.

    In 2009, Paul secured funding from Channel 4 and Screen West Midlands to set up Help Me Investigate, a platform for collaborative journalism. As it happens, that year the same source of funding supported our time-mapping service Mapumental, and Will Perrin’s hyperlocal blog project Talk About Local. The three projects were often covered in the press as harbingers of a new, digital way of doing things.

    The basic principle of Paul’s platform was that the internet permits collaboration between many people, each of whom can contribute a small piece towards the labour-intensive work of investigative journalism. It’s an approach we are all very familiar with these days: it is, of course, what we now call crowdsourcing — something mySociety has made use of in many of its own projects through the years, including our own WhatDoTheyKnow Projects.  

    A user, curious to get to the bottom of something, would share a central question and list out the tasks that needed to be completed in order to answer it. And of course, as often as not, some of these tasks would be the placing of FOI requests through our site, WhatDoTheyKnow.

    “When I launched Help Me Investigate”, says Paul, “WhatDoTheyKnow was a major tool in our toolkit, allowing us to easily share FOI requests that others could clone or learn from.” 

    Even more than that, he reckons WhatDoTheyKnow was “probably responsible both for me getting started with FOI, and for teaching others to use the FOI Act.”

    Since WhatDoTheyKnow’s beginnings, the aim has been to make FOI more accessible to everyone, so this was great to hear. We know that it’s a big leap to become ‘a person who submits FOI requests’, so what does that look like in practice?

    “Firstly”, says Paul, “the site reduced the barriers considerably when it came to making an FOI request: knowing where to send that request is a big mental barrier when you lack confidence navigating faceless organisations; and having examples to look at also makes a big difference in being able to imagine what one looks like.”

    Once someone has become adept with the Act, we can’t ask for much more than that they pass that knowledge onto others, creating a cascading effect of individuals who understand their rights and how to use them to uncover information. Paul is an example of exactly that:

    “It made it possible for me to share that knowledge with others. I’ve used it with hundreds of journalism students to introduce them to FOI: ‘copy this request, find your organisation, paste, and send’ helps get them started, and empowers students who might be otherwise feeling disempowered.”

    As proof of impact goes, ‘hundreds of journalism students learning how to use FOI’ certainly seems like a good one — it means that WhatDoTheyKnow has indirectly brought countless FOI-based stories to the public. 

    Paul listed some of the FOI-based investigations undertaken by users of his site — now no longer live, but visible through the Internet Archive. These include the uncovering of a £2.2 million overspend on Birmingham City Council’s website; police claims of sabotage against Climate Camp protesters; and the varying availability of hormonal contraceptives across different postcodes.

    It’s been fascinating to explore Help Me Investigate‘s archived pages, and a real reminder of what people can do when they come together. We are glad that WhatDoTheyKnow has played such a key part in that, and in the training of so many future journalists.

     

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    Image: Ashkan Forouzani

  3. Lost in Europe: a cross-border investigation into missing children

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    Posted in Alaveteli, Transparency, WhatDoTheyKnow

    It’s a painful subject to think about — children lost and unaccounted for as they migrate across Europe — but it’s also one that it’s vital to monitor and quantify. 24 investigative journalists from 12 European countries have taken on the job, coming together in the crossborder Lost in Europe (LIE) investigation.

    According to their findings, 18,292 unaccompanied child migrants went missing in Europe between January 2018 and December 2020 – that’s around 17 children slipping off the records every day, often into the world of crime, human trafficking and prostitution.

    Liset Hamming is an investigative journalist who also runs Wob-Knop, the Netherlands’ Freedom of Information site, on our Alaveteli platform. Last year, she messaged to say that a contact of hers within LIE was starting a new investigation.

    Liset would be assisting with sending FOI requests to immigration and border enforcement authorities in 16 European countries. We knew right away that the international Alaveteli network could provide exactly the help required.

    We made introductions to partners in Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Sweden, Hungary, Belgium, Greece and of course the WhatDoTheyKnow team here in the UK. Then via our partners at Ask the EU help was offered for filing requests in Italy and Spain.

    These experts were able to help Liset navigate the individual requirements of the FOI regime in each country, pointing toward the relevant authority and translating or refining the wording of the request being made. In some other countries, Liset made her own contacts.

    Local knowledge

    There’s a surprising amount you need to know before you start making FOI requests abroad. The Alaveteli network contacts were indispensable for their ability to answer questions about their local regimes: what law the requests would go under, what authority to request to, whether people from outside the country were legally eligible to make requests, what the deadlines were for responses and what recourse could be taken if these weren’t met. The information gathered from the various in-country contacts was put together with the preliminary research Lost in Europe had done into the availability of documents on child immigration numbers.

    Based on all of this, the requests took two different forms: in some places, it was clear exactly which document type needed to be asked for; while in others this was harder to pin down, and so the requests were more exploratory.

    This March, LIE ran a data bootcamp for their member journalists, data scientists and designers, as well as any others (including ourselves and our Alaveteli partners) who were involved in the investigation. They had three objectives for this two-day event:

    • Analysis of the most recent statistics, figures, calculation methods and the exchange of data between different EU countries
    • Identifying gaps in European laws, procedures and regulations in the field of children’s rights and migration
    • Pinning down design, communication and clear storytelling around figures and maps, for a broad public readership

    The discussions and outcomes of this intensive meetup were invaluable, and so far it has directly resulted in news stories across major publications in the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Greece, France, Romania and the UK.

    In the meantime the 16 requests have been filed and are in progress. The first responses from authorities are ‘dripping in’, as Liset puts it. Some FOI proceedings can take a while, as anyone who ever took up a similar challenge will confirm.

    The investigation is still in progress, and you can follow along with its latest file here. As a tangible sign of the value already being uncovered, this strand of LIE’s work won first place in the global IJ4EU Impact Award for cross border journalism. We’re very glad to have been able to assist in this small way to a vital investigation.

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    The requests

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    Image: Aude-Andre Saturnio