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The Ministry of Information in Bangladesh, in response and following continuous pressure from the local and international community, revised the previous version of the draft law, which has since created many debates inside as well as outside the country in recent weeks.
The first draft of the Right to Information (RTI) Bill was published on the website of Manusher Jonno Foundation -- a Dhaka based NGO, which led the drafting process that also involved civil society experts. By publishing the draft law online they set an example for the government, and for the first time in the history of Bangladesh, the government published the official draft of the RTI ordinance, albeit with spelling and grammatical errors on the website of the concerned ministry, which will remain on the site until Mar. 23, for public opinion.
This is a positive message for professionals connected with human rights issues. Activities by private citizens that lead to good governance, can, in the future set good examples and induce the government to imitate and implement the same for the welfare of its citizens.
However, in the ongoing debates in the country on the RTI Bill, media and legal experts mostly from Dhaka pointed out various contradictions and loopholes, which they claimed is another means to deny the people, the right to information. For example, the draft ordinance mentions that the law will come in effect within 120 days from the date of gazette notification. However, it fails to mention when the government will do the gazette notification.
In the 'Primacy of Ordinance,' section 3 says, "After entry into force, the provisions of this Ordinance shall have effect notwithstanding anything inconsistent therewith contained in the Official Secrets Act 1923, and any other law for the time being in force." This according to experts means that unless the Official Secrets Act of 1923, and or, section 5(1) of the Act is void, the right to information will be denied by the authorities in the excuse of 'public interest'.
In fact, section 8 of the proposed ordinance has nine points for rejecting the petitions of information-seekers. That includes denying information on the security of the State, sovereignty, foreign policy, business interest of certain institutions, and economic management policy of the government, that may influence and lead to criminal activities causing harm to public security.
The debaters urged the government to come out of its 'culture of secrecy' and establish a new culture of accountability and transparency. Professionals recommended changing some of the sections of the draft ordinance like sections 6 -- which entails information seekers to wait for 20 days for information. This delay can reduce the importance of the required information or even help the authorities to manipulate certain events related to the sought information. Section 7 --which should be describing the procedure for providing fast information, instead, rants on the scope of public officials who provide the information. Section 8 lists exemptions to revealing information by making the excuse of withholding the information for the sake of public interest.
The proposed Information Commission, according to section 12 of the proposed ordinance, seems overwhelmed with pro-government officials although a judge of the Appellate Division nominated by the chief justice of Bangladesh will head it. Ultimately, it is ridiculous to put the chairperson of the Public Service Commission, secretary of the Cabinet Division and chairperson of the University Grant Commission, all of whom are appointed by the government without any rules, in the Commission.
It cannot be denied that the public servants have a tendency, by default, of ignoring the needs and requests of the citizens. In the given circumstances, if the Information Commission consists of pro-government people, then the right to information can be assumed to be yet another joke. The authorities seem to have deliberately ignored placing representatives of the media in the Information Commission to conceal information as well make fake interpretation of the law when it comes in effect.
Moreover, there is no option or place in the Commission for human rights defenders although it is the most serious problem of the country. The authorities have always denied human rights defenders' right to information regardless of the many serious cases of gross human rights abuses.
The culture of concealing, hiding, and shelving information is one of the key reasons of the ongoing rampant corruption and abuse of power in public institutions in Bangladesh.
The country must come out of that nightmare. The Right to Information Bill should not come in effect with provisions for denying the people's right to access public information, as has been the case and culture in the country for centuries. Bangladeshis do not need any law of 'right to miss information'.
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(Rater Zonaki is the pseudonym of a human rights defender based in Hong Kong working at the Asian Human Rights Commission. He is a Bangladeshi national with a degree in literature from a university in Dhaka. He began his career as a journalist in 1990 and engaged in human rights activism at the grassroots level in his country for more than a decade. He also worked as an editor for publications on human rights and socio-cultural issues and contributed to other similar publications.)
