Sunday Times: Sri Lanka: Tuesday,
January 24, 2017.
The
193-member UN General Assembly has been dragging its feet on a proposal that
has been kicked around the corridors of the United Nations for over 10 years: a
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) providing journalists the “right to
information” in a sprawling bureaucracy protective of its turf.
Ironically,
nearly 100 countries all of them UN member states have approved some form of
national legislation recognising the right to information (RTI) within their
own borders but still seem unenthusiastic in extending it to the press corps at
the United Nations.
The US Freedom
of Information Act (FOIA), which dates back to 1967, has provided the public
and the press the right to request access to records from any federal agency and
has been described as “the law that keeps citizens in the know about their
government”.
In the US,
federal agencies are required to disclose any information requested under the
FOIA unless it falls under one of nine exemptions which protect interests such
as personal privacy, national security, and law enforcement.
In Australia,
the legislation is known as Right2Know; in Bangladesh, the Right to Information
(RTI) Resources Centre provides resources for those seeking to file a request
with government agencies; in Japan, the Citizens’ Centre for Information
Disclosure offers help to those interested in filing requests; in India, the
Right to Information: a Citizen Gateway is the portal for RTI; Canada’s Access
to Information Act came into force in 1983 and Kenya’s Access to Information
Act was adopted in August 2016, according to the Centre for Law and Democracy
(CLD).
The strongest
law among the new countries on the RTI Rating is that of Sri Lanka, which
scores 121 points, putting the country in 9th place globally, says CLD.
The passage
of this law means that every country in South Asia apart from Bhutan now has an
RTI law. The region is generally a strong performer, with every country scoring
over 100 points except Pakistan, which continues to languish near the bottom of
the rating, according to CLD.
And Sweden’s
Freedom of the Press Act of 1766 has been described as the “oldest in the
world.”
Samir Sanbar, a former UN Assistant
Secretary-General who headed the Department of Public Information (DPI), which
provides media accreditation and doles out free office space to UN-based
journalists, told IPS the right to information is an integral part of U.N.
principles.
But providing
that right even the basic information available in the public domain has been
stymied both by member states and the UN bureaucracy, he added.
He pointed
out that the need to “inform the peoples” of the United Nations is implicitly
indicated in the Charter.
But implementing it was “a basic issue I had
experienced throughout my work, with both certain government officials
including those publicly claiming open channels and many senior U.N.
Secretariat colleagues”.
Those who
believed “Information is Power” were very hesitant, to what they perceived was
sharing their authority with a wider public, said Sanbar who served under five
different UN Secretaries-General.
“It was most
evident that when I launched the now uncontested website www.un.org, a number
of powerful Under-Secretaries-General (USGs) and Permanent Representatives
cautioned me against “telling everyone what was happening” (in the UN system)
and refused to authorize any funds.”
“I had to
raise a team of DPI volunteers in my office, operating from within the existing
budget, to go ahead and eventually offer computers loaned from an outside
source, to certain delegations to realise it was more convenient for them to
access news releases than having to send one of their staffers daily to the
building to collect material from the third floor.”
Eventually,
everyone joined in, and the site is now recognised as one of the ten best
official sites worldwide.
“We had a
similar difficulty in prodding for International World Press Freedom Day
through the General Assembly. It seems that even those with the best of
intentions– since delegates represent official governments that view free press
with cautious monitoring– are usually weary of opening a potentially vulnerable
issue,” said Sanbar, author of the recently-released “Inside the U.N. in a
Leaderless World”.
Matthew Lee,
an investigative UN-based journalist who has been pursuing the story for over
10 years, told IPS he has been virtually fighting a losing battle.
“When I first
got to the UN in late 2005, I noticed there was no FOIA. After asking around
about it, I got then Under-Secretary-General (USG) for Management, Christopher
Burnham, to say he would work on it. But he left. So I asked his replacement at
Under-Secretary-General, Alicia Barcena, who said she would work on it. She
never did.”
The UN
Secretariat, he said, has continued to blame the General Assembly. But the
Secretariat could easily adopt its own policy, for example, to disclose who
pays for UN Secretary-General’s travel.
Asked about
the FOIA, UN deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq told IPS last year: “The
secretary-general supports the idea of transparency. But this would be an issue
for member states.”
Barbara
Crossette, a former UN Bureau Chief for the New York Times and currently
contributing editor and writer for PassBlue, an online publication covering the
UN, told IPS: “I think you are right, to be sceptical about getting anything
like this through the General Assembly. Or for that matter that the Security
Council would be cooperative, if asked for information.”
As you would
know, a lot of people who have worked in DPI see the General Assembly and the
Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions (ACABQ) in
particular as loathe to promote the sharing of information, even in the
current setup, and assume that not enough countries would back making access to
it a right, she noted.
“A FOIA would
be a godsend to would-be spies. And how would it be legally crafted, I wonder?.
It would be interesting to know if places like the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) have these policies.”
The new Secretary General Antonio Guterres’
team “is supposed to be writing a new communications policy for the UN making
it more open and effective in outreach generally. But I don’t know if that will
include journalists.”
In one of her
recent pieces in PassBlue, Crossette said the DPI is also completely hamstrung
by its mandate, officials acknowledge, and the head of the office, who ranks as
Under Secretary-General, is not chosen primarily for his or her media skills,
but is often a political appointee with little or no journalism experience.
He or she
must work under tight budgetary conditions deliberately framed to not give the
department the tools it needs, she added.
Sinha
Ratnatunga, editor-in- chief of the Sunday Times, a major weekly newspaper in
Sri Lanka, told IPS the RTI law was passed by parliament last June; signed into
law by the Speaker in August and becomes operational on February 4
(independence Day).
“However,
there is a provision to ‘stagger’ its implementation if the government isn’t
ready”, he pointed out.
“In any event the law must be operational
whether the government is ready or not by August 4 (one year after the Speaker
signed it into law). But the government is rather silent on how prepared they
are for February 4 which is hardly a fortnight or so away,” said Ratnatunga ,
Deputy Chairman, of the Sri Lanka Press Institute and Board Member of the World
Association of Newspapers (WAN-IFRA).
He said the
law is progressive but many people, including journalists “are pretty clueless
about its power and reach and what difference it can make to empowering
citizens and journalists in the quest of good governance.”
He said there’s a whole exercise of educating
public servants, appointing Information Officers, educating the journalists and
the citizenry ahead.
“Yes, the law
took 12 plus years in the making, but the most difficult process of educating
the country on the potential of the law lies ahead.”
“Hopefully,
the media will play the role of whistleblower, but fewer journalists are now
interested in investigative journalism; so we have to wait and see if all the
trouble in bringing the law was worth it, after all,” he declared.
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