Bringing-Them-Home-Report-Web

family history. Other agencies, however, continue to interpret third party privacyrestrictively and fail to assist searchers to meet their requirements for third party consent.The searcher can be denied the very information needed to identify family members andre-establish community and family links.The responsibility of governments to provide this information to Indigenous peoplegoes far beyond the standard justifications for FoI legislation, namely openness andaccountability of governments and the individual’s right to privacy. Indigenous peoplerequire personal, family and community information for even more fundamental reasons,namely to assist them to recover from a past marked by gross violations of their humanand community rights by governments. By committing themselves to implementRecommendation 53 all governments have recognised this claim. The second part ofRecommendation 53 states,The Commission recognises that questions of the rights of privacy and questions ofconfidentiality may arise and recommends that the principles and processes for access to suchrecords should be negotiated between government and appropriate Aboriginal organisations, butsuch negotiations should proceed on the basis that as a general principle access to suchdocuments should be permitted.Third, the access procedures should be simple, straightforward and very cheap, ifnot free of charge. In fact however access provisions and services are fragmented(Families on File 1996 page 1). Often the searcher will need to approach more than oneagency and go through different kinds of application procedures because ‘there are [still]inconsistencies in approaches both across jurisdictions and within them’ (Families on File1996 page 26).Where specialist research units exist they are able to access only the records createdby the departments of which they are a part or, in the case of archives, records alreadyarchived. Yet Indigenous people were subject to such control by government that relevantrecords are usually held in a number of departments. Indigenous children were oftensubject to multiple placements which could involve administration by more than onegovernment department and could also involve control by a non-government agency. Toreconstruct a child’s history a ‘file trail’ often needs to be followed. This is timeconsumingand complex. Existing research units are unable to provide the full assistanceservice needed and ‘no government has a streamlined process for delivering access to therecords of all its agencies’ (Families on File 1996 page 4 emphasis added).Where the application has to be made under FoI an application fee may be charged.The costs of making copies of documents may also be charged to the searcher. Levyingan application fee is not only inappropriate, it is unjust. The individual’s need for theinformation has been created by government policies identified as genocidal and as grossviolations of human rights. It is unjust to make restitution, including family reunion, andrehabilitation conditional on the victim’s ability to pay.Fourth, to ensure that all relevant records are identifiable and dealt with in anyparticular search all the records must be thoroughly indexed. In fact not even allgovernment-created records have yet been indexed (Families on File 1996 page 21).