Right to Information in Bhutan

The right to information in Bhutan is a constitutional entitlement recognised under Article 7(3) of the 2008 Constitution but not yet given statutory form. More than fifteen years after the Constitution came into force, no Right to Information (RTI) Act has been enacted. A bill passed the National Assembly in February 2014 but stalled in the National Council, and successive governments have neither revived it nor introduced a substitute. Bhutan remains the only South Asian country without a functioning RTI law, and is the sole country in the region left unrated on the Global RTI Rating maintained by the Centre for Law and Democracy and Access Info Europe.

The gap between the constitutional guarantee and the absence of an enforcement statute is the central feature of the debate. Citizens, journalists and opposition parliamentarians rely on informal channels, personal contacts and ad hoc departmental responsiveness rather than a legal right of request. Civil society organisations have lobbied for a statute since 2008; the government has repeatedly cited drafting complexity, the need for careful calibration with national security, and Bhutan's small-society information norms as reasons for delay.

Constitutional basis

Article 7 of the 2008 Constitution sets out fundamental rights. Clause (3) states, in full: "A Bhutanese citizen shall have the right to information." The provision is terse. It identifies the right and its holder but leaves the scope, exemptions, enforcement mechanism and procedural framework to be defined by legislation. No subsequent statute has supplied that framework. The constitutional right is therefore directly justiciable in principle but has no ordinary enforcement route: a citizen denied government information has no statutory complaints officer, appeal process or penalties to invoke.

Bhutan is not a party to a binding international right-to-information convention. It is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19 of which has been interpreted by UN bodies to include a right of access to information held by public authorities, but Bhutan has not ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the principal treaty instrument for that interpretation.

Early drafting, 2008 to 2013

Work on an RTI bill began almost immediately after the Constitution was adopted. At a 2008 meeting between the Cabinet and senior civil servants, the Prime Minister pledged to introduce an RTI bill "soon". The High Court drafted an initial version and sent it to the Ministry of Information and Communications (MoIC), which became the lead drafting ministry. Progress was slow. Between 2008 and 2012, successive iterations were produced, public consultations were announced, and the bill was repeatedly deferred in favour of other legislation.

Civil society pressure built during this period. The Bhutan Media Foundation, established in 2010 by Royal Charter, the Bhutan Centre for Media and Democracy and the Journalists' Association of Bhutan jointly pressed for enactment. Editorials in Kuensel and The Bhutanese repeatedly called on the government to stop stalling. A July 2012 editorial in The Bhutanese identified three drivers pushing the government towards the table: international donor expectations tied to the Eleventh Plan, sustained media advocacy, and a parallel initiative by National Council member Sangay Khandu from Gasa, who attempted to introduce a private member's RTI bill. The editorial also flagged substantive problems with the government draft, including a "public interest harm" exemption and a broad shield for deliberative advice that critics said would hollow out any right of access.

National Assembly passage, February 2014

After the People's Democratic Party won the 2013 general election under Tshering Tobgay, the new government tabled the RTI bill during the first session of the Second Parliament. On 5 February 2014, the National Assembly passed the Right to Information Bill. Of the forty members present, thirty-two voted in favour, four abstained, and four voted against. The bill then moved to the National Council, the upper house, for review.

The National Council impasse

The bill never emerged from the National Council in passable form. The immediate obstacle was procedural rather than substantive. The Council's Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Karma Yezer Raydi, asked the MoIC to make a presentation on the bill in early 2014 so the committee could begin its review. MoIC officials declined, citing a new Cabinet Secretariat directive requiring that all such requests be routed through the Secretariat. Cabinet Secretary Penden Wangchuk defended the routing as a coordination measure. The committee was left unable to schedule briefings, conduct consultations, or commission research.

By the 22 May 2014 tabling date, the committee was not ready. The bill was delayed, and the National Council signalled publicly that it regarded the Prime Minister's Office as obstructing its work. Freedom House's 2015 Freedom of the Press report recorded that "the National Council suggested that interference from the prime minister's office prevented the bill's presentation". The bill was not passed by the Council in the same form as the Assembly version. No joint sitting was called to resolve the disagreement, and the bill effectively lapsed. It was not reintroduced during the remainder of the PDP government's term.

Dormancy under DNT, 2018 to 2023

The 2018 general election returned the Druk Nyamrup Tshogpa (DNT) under Lotay Tshering. The RTI bill did not reappear on the legislative agenda during the DNT's five-year term. The government did not publicly reject the concept, but it did not reintroduce the 2014 draft, commission a new draft, or set a timeline. Civil society advocacy continued through the Bhutan Media Foundation and through periodic commentary in The Druk Journal published by BCMD, but without a government sponsor the bill remained shelved. The absence of RTI featured in Reporters Without Borders commentary and in Freedom House country reports as an unresolved structural weakness in Bhutan's democratic architecture.

Second PDP term and the 2025 question hour

The January 2024 election returned the PDP and Tshering Tobgay to power for a second, non-consecutive term. The government did not include an RTI bill in its initial legislative programme. The issue returned to the floor of Parliament on 17 June 2025, when opposition MP Tempa Dorji (Maenbi-Tsaenkhar) and Rinchen Wangdi (Bartsham-Shongphu) raised the need for an RTI bill during question hour in the National Assembly. Dorji described the difficulty opposition members face in obtaining timely information needed to scrutinise government work. Wangdi noted uneven access among journalists, saying some reporters received information while others were excluded.

The ministerial response came from Namgyal Dorji, Minister of Industry, Commerce and Employment. He said the government supported media access to information and acknowledged that the bill had been "previously introduced and deliberated in Parliament" but had failed to pass owing to insufficient support. The minister did not commit to a fresh bill or a timeline. As of April 2026, no RTI Act has been enacted and no new draft has been tabled.

Civil society and media advocacy

The principal advocates inside Bhutan have been the Bhutan Media Foundation, the Bhutan Centre for Media and Democracy and the Journalists' Association of Bhutan. The BMF has published periodic assessments of media freedom that include RTI as a structural indicator. BCMD's quarterly publication, The Druk Journal, has run several essays on information access and its relationship to good governance and the practice of Gross National Happiness. JAB has raised RTI at most of its annual general meetings and at World Press Freedom Day events.

Outside Bhutan, international partners including UNESCO, Article 19, Reporters Without Borders and the Centre for Law and Democracy have flagged the absence of an RTI law as a gap. Freedom House's annual country reports consistently note that the 2014 bill was passed by the National Assembly but never enacted. The Open Government Partnership and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation have included Bhutan in regional analyses as the outlier South Asian state.

International comparison

Every other country in South Asia has an enacted RTI statute. India's Right to Information Act 2005 is the regional benchmark and the model against which Bhutan's draft was most frequently compared during the 2012 to 2014 debate. Nepal enacted its Right to Information Act in 2007. Bangladesh followed with the Right to Information Act 2009. Pakistan's provincial regimes preceded the federal Right of Access to Information Act 2017. Sri Lanka enacted its Right to Information Act in 2016. The Maldives passed its Right to Information Act in 2014, the same year the Bhutanese bill stalled.

The RTI Rating maintained by the Centre for Law and Democracy and Access Info Europe scores national RTI laws against 61 indicators drawn from international standards. As of 2025 the rating covers 136 countries. Bhutan is not scored because there is no enacted statute to evaluate. The unrated status is a factual observation, not a ranking, but it is routinely cited in UNESCO's World Trends in Freedom of Expression reports and in regional comparisons as evidence of an outstanding gap.

Contested framings

The debate over why the bill has not been enacted runs along predictable lines. The government position, articulated at various points by MoIC, the Cabinet Secretariat and PDP ministers, emphasises that drafting is technically demanding in a bilingual Dzongkha-and-English administration, that exemptions must be carefully calibrated to protect national security and deliberative processes, and that Bhutan's small-society norms of access and consultation already deliver much of what an RTI statute would formalise.

Civil society, exile media and international rights organisations argue that the decade-long delay reflects political unwillingness rather than drafting difficulty. Reporters Without Borders, which ranked Bhutan 152nd on its 2025 World Press Freedom Index after an earlier peak of 33rd in 2022, has repeatedly cited the absence of RTI as a structural constraint on press freedom. The Bhutanese and Bhutan Watch have argued that the procedural stalemate of 2014 was itself engineered to prevent a bill the executive did not want. Academic observers writing in The Druk Journal and in Springer's 2023 volume on the rule of law in Bhutan have taken a middle position, treating both the drafting difficulty and the political reluctance as real and mutually reinforcing.

Coverage gap

Coverage of the RTI debate inside Bhutan has been uneven. Kuensel and The Bhutanese have reported on the main legislative events and on parliamentary question-hour exchanges. Independent investigative reporting on why the bill stalled, who within the executive opposed it, and what precisely is in the current draft has been limited. Most detailed documentation comes from The Bhutanese's 2012 to 2014 coverage, from Freedom House and RSF annual reports, and from occasional academic treatments. Exile publications including Bhutan News Service and Bhutan Watch have flagged the absence of RTI as part of broader critiques of press freedom but have not produced sustained legislative reporting on the subject.

Current status

Status as of April 2026: No Right to Information Act has been enacted in Bhutan. Article 7(3) of the Constitution remains unrealised in statutory form. The 2014 bill passed by the National Assembly was never approved by the National Council and has not been reintroduced. Bhutan is the only country in South Asia without an RTI statute and the only South Asian country unrated on the Global RTI Rating.