Daily
ft.lk : Sri lanka: Friday, August 30, 2019.
Right
to Information (RTI) legislation was a landmark moment for Sri Lanka and
arguably one of the most important and progressive efforts by the Government.
However, passing legislation and implementing legislation are two different
things and Sri Lanka still has miles to go before RTI achieves its full
potential.
Transparency
International Sri Lanka (TISL) launching the 2019 Implementation Assessment of
the RIT Act in Sri Lanka this week, has noted that whilst Sri Lanka ranks
fourth in the Global RIT Rating, which is a reflection of the strength of the
RTI Act, the current implementation of the RTI Act has yielded a mid-range
(yellow) grade for the country.
The
objective of the TISL RTI Assessment was to gauge the implementation of the RTI
Act, focusing on three areas; Proactive disclosure, Institutional measures and
Processing of requests. Of the three areas assessed, Sri Lanka has scored red
for proactive disclosure, yellow for institutional measures and yellow for the
processing of requests.
The
approach for the assessment was adopted from the ‘Freedom of Information
Advocates Network’ (FOIAnet), which is an international network working to
promote RTI. FOIAnet uses a colour grading system and numerical scoring to rate
a country’s RTI implementation. The colour scoring ranges from; Red (needs
significant improvement), Yellow (needs some improvement), and Green (needs
little improvement).
It
is unsurprising that Sri Lanka would score red in the proactive disclosure
category as this process remains minimal at best. After the Constitutional
crisis the Government even stopped the weekly Cabinet briefing, which earlier
functioned as a platform where media could question decisions made by Cabinet,
publicise important decisions made by the Government and present citizen
concerns to policymakers.
Cabinet
papers have to be laboriously found through contacts, which is extremely
detrimental to transparency and engagement on important policies. Few
ministries, institutions or departments proactively release information for the
sake of updating the public and even when reports are released they are not in
easy to consume formats that average people can read and understand or are
accessible online. Departments are far more comfortable relaying information to
each other but are reluctant to have that same information publicly discussed.
Obviously
there will always be matters that cannot be disclosed but policies on key
issues such as education, housing, healthcare, and policies that impact the
economy should remain within the public domain as well. Ultimately the
Government has the responsibility to act in public interest and transparency is
important to prevent corruption, especially in a country where justice on
corruption matters still remains largely elusive.
The
RTI space should also encourage whistle blowing and push opaque public
departments that handle vast amounts of public money such as Customs, the
Inland Revenue Department and Budget allocations to be more transparent.
Institutional measures and faster processing of requests also need to be looked
at.
One
positive that the study found was that public institutions at the district and
divisional administrative levels have performed better than those at national
level. This demonstrates a more responsive State at the primary point of
citizen interaction, which can spur a bottom-up drive to improve RTI
implementation.
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