The International Day for Universal Access to Information is observed on 28 September. For 2026, UNESCO announces the theme “Upholding Information Integrity in the Digital Age: The role of access to Information in addressing Information Disorder”.

The Government of Sierra Leone, with UNESCO, is hosting the IDUAI 2026 global conference in Freetown from 28 to 30 September, back-to-back with the 17th International Conference of Information Commissioners. UNESCO’s article places the meeting at Freetown International Conference Centre, Aberdeen.

The day was proclaimed by UNESCO’s General Conference in 2015 and recognised by the UN General Assembly in 2019. It is not a new treaty: it is an annual marker for access-to-information laws and how they are applied.

UNESCO’s agenda mentions, among other items, a Centre for Law and Democracy exercise testing information requests in practice in states with RTI laws. Those test results are not restated here as final statistics, because the full report is not reproduced in the source consulted.

National laws, deadlines and exemptions differ. Data protection, security and other legitimate interests must be balanced with transparency; access also means information can be found, understood and used, including by people with disabilities.

Legal regimes are not described as identical, and no guests are invented for the Freetown conference beyond the frame announced by UNESCO.

For Romania or the United Kingdom, applicable legislation is cited separately, not by automatic analogy with Sierra Leone or with UN resolutions.

Image: Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress Main Reading Room, public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

Source consulted: International Day for Universal Access to Information 2026 — UNESCO.