THE government continues to drag its feet over the issue of enacting a right to information law and putting in place institutional mechanisms so that citizens are able to seek information on any matter from federal public bodies and whenever they want. In the absence of effective right to information legislation, only that information is given out which the government deems fit to be shared, or which is leaked to journalists.

The situation so far is that the federal government has constituted a Senate select committee to reconcile the Right to Information Bill, approved by the Senate Committee on Information and Broadcasting, with the Right of Access to Information (RAI) Bill, drafted by the federal government. The committee held its meetings in January and gave its recommendations to the federal government at the end of the month. Since then, there has been silence on the part of the federal government on the issue of this vital piece of legislation. As mentioned in a previous article (‘A tale of two bills’) published last year in Dawn, the RAI Bill is structurally flawed and incorporating into it the recommendations of the Senate select committee would be tantamount to putting toothpaste back into the tube.

Instead of demonstrating the urgency and seriousness that the challenge deserves, successive governments have been kicking the can down the road. During the tenure of the PPP-led coalition government, Yousuf Raza Gilani in his address to parliament in March 2008 soon after his nomination as prime minister, and president Asif Ali Zardari in his first address to a joint sitting of parliament in September that year, promised to repeal the Freedom of Information Ordinance, 2002 and enact a new information law.

Sherry Rehman, Qamar Zaman Qaira and Firdous Ashiq Awan as federal information ministers kept on making public pledges that the law would be enacted. Similarly, their counterparts in the present set-up, Senator Pervez Rasheed and Maryam Aurangzeb have made numerous public pronouncements with regard to the draft law, but legislation has been delayed on one pretext or the other. In a nutshell, both the PML-N and the PPP in their combined nine years of holding the reins have failed to fulfil the promise they made in writing in the Charter of Democracy.

Elected representatives should support the Right to Information Bill.

In 2013, for the first time in the history of the country, we witnessed political consensus on the issue of legislating an effective right to information law as demonstrated by the unanimous approval of the Right to Information Bill by the Senate Committee on Information and Broadcasting represented by all political parties. The federal bureaucracy, sensing an effective right to information law would be a threat to its vested interests, threw a spanner in the works and prevailed upon the federal government to opt for the RAI Bill instead. Not only this, the bogey of the ‘threat to national security’ was raised and the whole of last year wasted ostensibly to review the Right to Information Bill in the name of the ‘changing security situation’.

There is a need for course correction; elected representatives should wrest the initiative from the federal bureaucracy as an effective right to information law is not in its interest. Their good intentions notwithstanding, elected representatives need to understand that even if their recommendations are incorporated in a highly flawed RAI Bill in one shape or the other, it would be a far weaker law than the one they unanimously approved in 2013. Therefore, instead of being lured by the federal bureaucracy into incorporating recommendations into a structurally flawed RAI Bill, elected representatives should support the Right to Information Bill.

Even after legislating a right to information law, considerable time would be required to operationalise its various provisions. The establishment of the proposed Pakistan Information Commission would require time, as the process of hiring suitable members will have to be initiated and service rules finalised so that the commission can hire the requisite staff to carry out its functions.

Furthermore, public information officers would not only have to be designated in federal public bodies, they would also require training and sensitisation in order to carry out their roles and responsibilities under a right to information law. Both the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Information Commission and the Punjab Information Commission have faced stiff resistance from the bureaucracy in operationalising different provisions of KP’s Right to Information Act, 2013 and the Punjab Transparency and Right to Information Act, 2013.

For example, Mukhtar Ahmed Ali, information commissioner of the Punjab Information Commission, publicly stated that the Punjab bureaucracy launched an ‘organised resistance’ against the implementation of the Punjab Transparency and Right to Information Act, 2013. The Punjab bureaucracy created hurdles in the approval of service rules for the commission. As a result, throughout their three-year tenure, information commissioners were forced to work without requisite staff to carry out their obligations under the law.

Similarly, rules for the KP Right to Information Act, 2013 have yet not been notified by the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government despite three years of the enactment of this law.

In other words, the right to information legislation is the first of many battles that has to be waged against the vested interests for the realisation of citizens’ right to information. Successive battles against these interests — that have been at odds with the interests of the citizens with regard to the judicious utilisation of national resources through the transparent functioning of federal public bodies in the last 70 years — will only be won if the centre understands the games being played by the bureaucracy. It must stop the futile process of incorporating the Senate select committee recommendations in the RAI Bill and initiate the process of enacting the Right to Information Bill without further delay.

The writer is a rights activist.

zahid@cpdi-pakistan.org

Twitter: @XahidAbdullah

Published in Dawn, March 11th, 2017