Right to Information: South Asian experts for taking movement to grassroots level

Experts from regional countries including Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal on Wednesday stressed the need for taking the movement for Right to Information (RTI) to the grassroots level to ensure good governance.
Experts from the regional think tanks, parliamentarians, activists and officials expressed their views on the RTI laws in their respective countries here at the opening of a two-day regional conference on Right to Information in South Asia: securing the right to information by linking civil society, media, government officials and legislators throughout the South Asian region, organised by Pildat.
Chief Information Commissioners Sahibzada Muhamad Khalid from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Mazhar Hussain Minhas from Punjab were co-hosts of the conference.
The delegates from the regional countries, while sharing status of implementation of RTI regimes in their respective country, agreed that South Asian states face somewhat similar challenges in promulgation of RTI regimes.
They believed that in the South Asian region, RTI laws alone would not ensure transparency but public interest and use of the law was crucial. According to them, there exists a great merit in South Asian countries learning from good practices among each other on effective RTI practices.
There was also an agreement that the RTI movement needs to penetrate to the grassroots level and ensure good governance and underscored the crucial role of media in popularising RTI Laws and their usage in societies.
About the state of RTI law in Pakistan, it was shared that the country's existing Federal Freedom of Information Ordinance ranks 84th in the world according to the International Rating Agency, Centre for Law and Democracy, Canada.
Pakistani experts, parliamentarians and civil society activists urged the government to pass the new RTI law without further delay, which is waiting to get approval for the last one year.
Speaking on 'Protecting and Disclosing Sensitive Information under RTI', panel chair, Senator Mushahid Hussain Syed, who is also chairman Senate Standing Committee on Defence, urged the government not to further delay the passage of the internationally-acclaimed Right to Information Bill, 2014 on account of concerns for the security of sensitive information on defence and foreign relations.
The Bill was approved by the Senate on July 15, 2014 but is still waiting to be tabled in the National Assembly.
He said Saarc countries should not engage in any kind of process hampering the cyber security of each other and stressed the need for working together to protect the privacy.
While referring to the access to information, he lamented that reports of various commissions from the assassination of the country's first Prime Minister Liaqat Ali Khan, Benazir Bhutto to the Osama bin-Laden killing in Abbottabad are yet to be made public, adding it was fundamental right of the people of the country to know the facts.
However, he also acknowledged the fact that certain secret information are not being made public in rest of the world as well as citing the case of former US president Ronald Reagan in which the CIA revealed half the truth.
Former Interior Secretary Tasneem Noorani, who is also PTI's chief election commissioner for the intra-party elections, said the second level of resistance to RTI might be the government officials who may not wholeheartedly accept that the intricacies of their activities need to be opened to public scrutiny.
He pointed out that one of the key weapons of the RTI in Pakistan was the question hour of parliament where every ministry and government department was required to provide information to the public representatives when asked.
Dr Jaymapathy Wickramaratne, President's Counsel and MP, Parliament of Sri Lanka, shared with the participants the Sri Lankan Draft RTI Bill that has been ranked the seventh best in the world.
He said the Sri Lankan RTI Bill had been drafted as such that it could not be trumped in emergencies declared by the government. "It can only be overridden through an amendment in the law," he added.
Nikhil Dey, Founding Member, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), Rajasthan, India, while speaking, urged civil society and the media to highlight the potential uses of RTI in the public by utilising it in the course of their work. He cited the example of the 10,000 RTI applications that the MKSS had helped ordinary citizens lodge in the state of Rajasthan in the 'Jawabdehi Yatra'.
Aruna Roy, Founding Member MKSS, also spoke on the link between RTI and improved delivery of social services as well as reduced corruption, saying that governance is most effective when it is a participatory affair.
On Over viewing the Right to Information in South Asia and the world, Ahmed Bilal Mehboob, President, Pildat, said the future of RTI in the South Asian would be bright if relevant stakeholders were convened to discuss shared issues and concerns on a regular basis.
Dr Jagdeep Chhokar, Association for Democratic Reform, India; Taranath Dahal, Chairman, Freedom Forum, Nepal, Luwie Ganeshathan, Centre for Policy Alternatives, Sri Lanka and Michael Karnaicholas, Centre for Law and Democracy, Canada, apprised the participants of the evolution and progress of RTI movements in their respective countries.