A prominent Chinese artist and activist has filed a suit against the Ministry of Civil Affairs for allegedly failing to respond to his request for information about the toll and cost of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
Ai Weiwei (艾未未) said yesterday that he filed a request in November asking the ministry how many buildings fell in the quake, the amount of donations received, the cost of recovery and other details but has yet to receive a response.
China enacted a freedom of information regulation on May 1, 2008, allowing citizens to request information and get a response from the government within 15 to 30 days, but implementation has been slow and uneven.
Ai, an avant-garde artist and high-profile critic of Beijing’s policies, said he filed a suit with the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate Court on Monday, demanding that the ministry respond to his request.
The court has about a week to notify Ai if it will accept the case.
Asked whether Ai’s request had been received, an official with the ministry’s information office who would only give her surname Zhang demanded a faxed query. There was no immediate reply.
Ai said he sent disclosure requests to about 100 other government agencies and NGOs, many of which have already replied.
The ministries of construction and education both responded with similar short letters that said all the relevant information he asked for was publicly available or not yet approved for release.
The 2008 quake is politically sensitive because of the large number of schoolchildren that died and suspicions that shoddy construction and corruption were partly to blame. The government has been slow to release information that might clear up those suspicions and took nearly a year to issue an official estimate — 5,335 — for the number of students killed.
Two activists who probed student deaths have been jailed for unrelated offenses, though supporters insist they are being punished for their quake activism.
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