Colombo Page: Colombo: Saturday,
February 11, 2017.
Following the
announcement of rules and regulations on Right Information Act by Minister of
Parliamentary Reforms and Mass Media Gayantha Karunathilake last week, Sri
Lanka has reached third best place in the RTI global ranking.
Sri Lanka
ranks at the third place in the Global Right to Information Rating, which
assess country's legal framework according to 61 indicators. Mexico and Serbia
are in the first and second places.
Sri Lanka
received a total score of 131 out of 150 in seven categories - Right of Access,
Scope, Requesting procedures, Exceptions, Appeals, Sanctions, and Promotional
measures.
Sri Lanka has
become the best in South Asia, passing India says, Canadian based RTI watch-dog
Center for Law and Democracy (CLD), a co-founder of the Right to Information
Rating.
"Countries
often go up a few points on the RTI rating when they adopt rules and
regulations. But this is an impressive jump up for a country which already had
a very strong score, so both the minister and the commission deserve to be
congratulated for their good work," CLD Executive Director Toby Mendel was
quoted in its website www.law-democracy.org.
When the bill
was unanimously adopted in Parliament last August Sri Lanka was in the seventh
place of global ranking and then dropped in to the ninth place. However, the
new regulations of the act has added ten more points to Sri Lanka which brought
it to the third best place in its global ranking.
The rules and
regulations were gazetted last week by the Minister in concurrence of the RTI
Commission in Sri Lanka.
The
implementation of the act was commenced on February 3rd and countrywide public
authorities had received more than 300 RTI applications on the first working
day of the week.
"Sri
Lanka now faces the challenging task of implementing its strong legal framework
for the right to information. CLD calls on the Ministry, public authorities and
the Commission to ensure that this happens, and notes that it remains willing
to provide support for this process," CLD said.
This is a
significant achievement for Sri Lanka. And also this is just a beginning of a
long journey. We will do our best to establish good governance and democracy in
this country, says Minister Gayantha Karunathilake.