Information Commission within days

The News International: PK: Friday, September 28, 2018.

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf government is to notify the formation of the Federal Information Commission within days, in line with the requirements of the Federal Right of Access to Information (RTI) Act 2017, Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Media Iftikhar Durrani said.

The three-member commission, which would ensure implementation of the law, was approved by former prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi on his last day in office in May, but the Ministry of Information has yet to issue a notification to this effect.

The RTI law was enacted by the National Assembly in October 2017, but the constitutional right to information is still elusive for Pakistanis, as the law is yet to be implemented in letter and spirit. A new study has also confirmed that as many as 17 federal ministries do not even have a functioning website to facilitate the general public.

According to official figures, about 30 percent of Pakistanis rely on the Internet and smart phones for information. The absence of online government platforms provides zero facilitation to even educated taxpayers. This is a breach of article 19-A of the Constitution and the RTI Act 2017, which require the state to enable access to official information for citizens.

The research study, conducted by the Islamabad-based Institute of Research, Advocacy and Development (IRADA), was released on the eve of the International Day for Universal Access to Information (IUDAI), commemorated globally every year on September 28.

It shows some 17 of the total 46 federal ministries functional between the last day of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz government and the start of the Pakistan Tehreek-i- Insaf administration in 2018 did not even have websites.

Of the remaining 27 that did, most failed spectacularly at complying with section 5 of the RTI Act, which requires all federal public bodies, including federal ministries, to provide a minimum of 39 categories of information.

This non-compliance impedes transparency, accountability and access to information. It also represents a failure by the Pakistani government to adhere to its commitments under the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. They require transparency, good governance and development through the implementation of policy and statutory guarantees on access to information.

Durrani told The News that PTI government would fulfill its manifesto promises on transparency and the right to information.

“We had promised that our government will ensure transparency and nothing will be kept secret from public. We will ensure that this promise is fulfilled, just like it was done in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa during the last PTI tenure,” Durrani said.

He said the PTI government would ensure full implementation of the federal RTI law.

Muhammad Aftab Alam, the Executive Director of IRADA, says the right to information empowers citizens to optimally benefit from all recognised rights and to claim others. It also makes governments and public agencies accountable and transparent.

“Allowing people to seek and receive public documents serves as a critical tool for fighting corruption, enabling citizens to more fully participate in public life, making governments more efficient, encouraging investment, and helping persons exercise their fundamental human rights,” he said.

This study was co-authored by Aftab Alam and Adnan Rehmat. It shows that even among the 29 federal ministries online, most performed bad-to-poor in terms of mandatory categories of information

Even the best performing federal ministry in this regard – the Ministry of Finance – scored less than 50 percent on compliance with proactive disclosure requirements. The four worst performing ministries scored less than 20% in this category.

The study shows most federal ministries fail to provide over half the categories of information on their website required under the proactive disclosure clause.

The definition of a public body in the federal RTI law encompasses all federal ministries, courts, Parliament, and several incorporated and unincorporated bodies working under federal statutes. As per the Act, each public body is required to publish and upload to the Internet the information and records mentioned in section 5 within six months of the enforcement of the Act.

Since the law was enacted in October 2, 2017, all public bodies were supposed to proactively disclose this information by April 13, 2018. However, a big majority of public bodies still lag significantly behind in either ensuring their online presence or, if their websites exist, by providing only a limited amount of information proactively.