Pak politicos withdraw right of access to public information

Politicians have taken away from the people a recently authorised right of access to public information, say Pakistani journalists and human rights activists.

The six-month-old Freedom of Information Ordinance, 1997, which was promulgated by a caretaker government last January, lapsed when Pakistan's parliament, the National Assembly, failed to introduce it as a bill in the budget session earlier this month.

Rights campaigners had hoped that the Nawaz Sharief government -- which was voted to power last February -- would make the ordinance a law, in its entirety or with amendments.

A government spokesperson claimed the ordinance, drafted by the interim government, was "more close to the American Information Act and not fully suitable for Pakistan's environment.''

''Whoever fed him that line obviously never read the American one,'' veteran journalist and women's rights activist Najma Sadeque says. ''Of course, they will also not explain why they consider it unsuitable for us.''

In her opinion, the ordinance was ''in essence'' very similar to laws that protect an individual's right to public information in other countries. ''In fact, those in Canada, Australia and the US are backed up by systems that can more quickly and effectively nab wayward officials,'' she said.

Some Pakistanis managed to make use of the ordinance. Tauseef, a teacher in Karachi who was embroiled in a long civil suit related to illegal land-grabbing forced local authorities to provide him information in the case by threatening to file a case if they persisted in stonewalling.

Yet, most law-makers see no reason for the legislation. Ayaz Amir, a member of the provincial assembly in Punjab, Prime Minister Sharief's home state, said the right to information is ''hardly a priority in a country where it's near impossible to get a copy of a first information report from the police''.

He pointed out that there are a myriad laws for the protection of people's rights, but the problem in Pakistan is in their implementation. ''Those laws that exist are not implemented and followed, so what good will a new act do?'' he asked.

Right to obtain public information is, in fact, implicit in Article 19 of the constitution, as a Pakistan supreme court judgment of 1993 points out. The ruling notes it is the government's responsibility to take the people into confidence.

But in Pakistan this has never been the case. Politicians are averse to sharing information which they guard as their source of power. ''Only those who have something to hide would continue to block the passage of this bill,'' observed Sadeque.

And that would include just about everyone in the political and bureaucratic circles, said Najam Sethi, editor of The Friday Times who was a member of the caretaker cabinet that passed the ordinance. Some of the others on the drafting committee were Shahid Hamid, governor of Punjab, journalists Javed Jabbar and Irshad Haqqani and lawyer Fakhruddin Ebrahim.

Participating in a recent workshop organised jointly by the German NGO, Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, and the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Sethi said he used the threat of resignation to force the interim administration to set up a committee to draft the ordinance. The caretaker regime was appointed after Benazir Bhutto was sacked as Pakistani premier.

He said the ordinance was hurriedly drafted, and was flawed -- it applied only to the federal government and excluded from its purview institutions like prisons and the police. Also the ordinance did not provide provisions for penalising an official or agency that was found to be withholding information.

And even more glaringly, the Pakistani ordinance did not cover information that was ''notings on files, minutes of meetings and interim records'' and ''records declared classified by the government''.

I A Rehman, a former editor of the Pakistan Times and HRCP director, says this is counterproductive because ''practically every file and record in every government office is automatically stamped 'classified' or 'secret'. Even the material printed in the government gazette is marked 'classified', although it is copied in public documents''.

Neither did the ordinance make it mandatory for government departments and institutions to update records and dates, which are essential for providing information to the public.

In addition, the freedom to information ordinance was promulgated as another rights law and not as the paramount law. As a result, according to Abbas Rashid, a social researcher, ''a host of laws can be invoked any time there is a desire to suppress information''.

Many of the laws for the security of the state and officials are antiquated, enacted during British rule, like the Official Secrets Act, the Criminal Procedure Code (especially section 99-A which has been used to ban publications), the maintenance of public order, and the Registration of Printing, Press, and Publications Ordinance.

Even the freedom ordinance was far from universalising right of access to information, based on democratic principles. ''What we are still struggling to achieve in Pakistan is a right (to information) guaranteed to the public in Sweden 231 years ago,'' says Asha'ar Rehman, a journalist and rights activist.

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