The textbook notes that “over seventy countries around the world have implemented some form of freedom of information legislation… the oldest being Sweden's Freedom of the Press Act of 1766.” This Act is remarkable for its age — it predates the American Bill of Rights (1791) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789). It established that government documents should be available to the public, laying the philosophical groundwork for what would later be called sunshine laws or open records laws. The core principle it established — that the burden of proof lies on the government to justify withholding information, rather than on the citizen to justify requesting it — became the global standard for freedom of information legislation. In contrast, Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted 1948) globalised this principle at the international level.