By Conrado de Quiros : Posted 05:46:00 06/10/2010 Philippine Daily Inquirer
The bad news is that the Freedom of Information Act didn’t pass because there weren’t enough congressmen to pass it. Which was a fitting end to Prospero Nograles’ House: It ended not with a bang but with a whimper. That’s so despite the minor bang the shunting of the bill sparked from its irate supporters. The defeat of the bill by lack of quorum is a miserable reminder of the miserable way Prospero’s House blocked every effort to give justice to this land by throwing miserable technicalities in its path.
The good news is that the defeat is temporary. The bill will be passed next month when the Prosperos of this world will cease to be prosperous or to be there to torment us. Though not without irony: The law will hold sway in circumstances that least need it. That law would have counted for the world during President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s time when it could have compelled government officials, not least Arroyo herself, to face us. Instead it will hold sway under a government that is determined to make everything known, that means to ensure transparency at every level. But you never know, the new president is surrounded too by people with a lot to hide. And who need to be compelled to tell the truth.
I expect the FOI to be as important in fighting corruption as Reynato Puno’s writ of amparo was in fighting human rights abuses. The writ of amparo did help Edith Burgos and many others get some headway in their cases. At the very least, it made them less vulnerable to being given the runaround by the military, the number one suspect in the murders and disappearances being forced to open their doors to scrutiny.
The FOI should do the same thing for civilians. Easy to appreciate its value if you imagine how it might have worked during Arroyo’s time. Romulo Neri might never have been able to cower behind the shield of “executive privilege,” nor indeed might have Arroyo herself. It was the NBN in fact that drove the people behind the FOI to propose it, patterned after the one found in the developed countries. I don’t know that it would have brought Arroyo down had it been there during the NBN hearing, but it would have been a start. A huge start.
Truth was the number one victim in Arroyo’s time. It should be first in line to be restored. I myself would prefer a Truth Commission, one that would prosecute those who lied, cheated, stole, and murdered in the last regime as much as lay out the mechanisms for transparency in the new one. But I’d settle for the FOI in the meantime.
I have a caveat to all this however, and it is a huge one. That is that the FOI is only as good as we have the will to back it up. All laws are. There’s one very big rub. Because in this country, we tend to think of laws as some kind of incantation or magic wand to take the place of our having to work at all. We imagine that the law by itself, of itself, and in itself, will do the trick. When it doesn’t do the trick, we conjure another law, hoping the new one will. Naturally it also fails. The principle is simple: You can have as many laws as you want, but unless you yourself are prepared to make it work, none of it will matter.
Look what happened after Brig. Gen. Francisco Gudani and Col. Alexander Balutan went to the Senate to talk about the cheating in the 2004 elections. Common sense—which is really the basis of law, “truths we hold to be self-evident”—quite apart from the Constitution must tell us that they had every right to do it, that it was of vital national interest that they did it. But Arroyo simply manufactured another law that said no official could testify against her without her permission, and before you could say “Garci” the two were whisked away and thrown into a dungeon. And we lapsed into silence. The bishops of course did not, sighing that was just the way life went, let’s move on.
That’s the reason I say I’m not so sure the FOI would have brought Arroyo down even if it had been there during the NBN hearings. Because even if it had exposed Arroyo to have masterminded the scam, what of it? The “Hello, Garci” scandal did exactly that, and about a far bigger scam, and it did not oust her, it merely emboldened her to concoct scheme after scheme, mount scam after scam, gather scum after scum. What’s to prevent another Arroyo, or Marcos, from simply declaring in future that the FOI or the writ of amparo may not apply under certain circumstances, those circumstances being their own?
Laws are only as good as they are fought for, as they are backed up by sanctions, as they are practiced again and again and again till they become reflex action, till they become a course for which there is simply no alternative. None of this is to diminish the importance of the FOI (or the writ of amparo, or the other vital laws), all of this is to say that the FOI, like its brethren, is merely a platform from which to mount grand proceedings. The actors—who are the people—are not there, there won’t be any grand proceedings.
What should give the FOI substance is the prosecution of the criminals during Arroyo’s time. They are legion, starting from the top. That is the ground from which truth will sprout. You cannot punish those who lied, cheated, stole and murdered in the past, you cannot punish those who will lie, cheat, steal and murder in the future. You cannot show that it was never the executive’s privilege to treat the public like mushrooms, to keep in the dark and drop organic fertilizer on, you will never be able to show that it is never the executive’s privilege to treat the public like dirt, to rub off when it gets irritatingly in the eyes. You want the world to be free to inform, you need its tormentors to not be free to lie. Law flourishes only where crime is punished.
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