Editorial | Strengthen ATI Act

This newspaper shares the Jamaica Environment Trust’s concern over the backsliding of government agencies in adhering to the Access to Information (ATI) law and repeat our call of more than a year ago for the legislation to be given real teeth to hold to account those bureaucrats who stifle transparency.

Robert Morgan, the information minister, must, therefore, accelerate Parliament’s review of the legislation, including the embrace of a review committee’s recommendations of a dozen years ago that the ATI unit at the prime minister’s office be transformed into an autonomous statutory body to provide more robust oversight of the law. That committee also proposed that regular reports of the unit be sent to Parliament, ensuring greater transparency into the operation of the act.

Passed in 2002, the ATI legislation came into effect two years later. Its declared intention was to enhance government accountability and transparency “by granting to the public a general right of access to official documents held by public authorities”.

Some documents remained inaccessible, and bureaucrats remained overcautious regarding the information they were inclined to release, influenced in some cases, perhaps, by the continued existence of the Official Secrets Act. It is very likely, too, that these public officials acted with more than a wink and nod, if not the formal imprimatur of ministers.

But as the Jamaica Envioronment Trust (JET) acknowledged in a statement last week, the ATI Act improved the public’s access to government information.

“[T]he ATI Act marked a sea change for civil-society groups and individuals wanting information on issues that concerned them,” JET said.

CONCERN

JET’s concern at this time has to do with the National Environmental and Planning Agency (NEPA), which has a reputation for being less than rigorous in its enforcement of environmental standards and as a laggard in transparency in its actions.

Under the law, agencies have 30 days within which to acknowledge, and preferably provide, ATI requests. But they can extend the time for another 30 days if there is “reasonable cause” to do so.

If requests are denied, the applicant can seek a review and, ultimately, appeal to a tribunal – a process that is especially easy. There are no consequences for errant officials.

In the case of JET and NEPA, since March of this year, the former, an NGO, has filed five ATI requests with the latter. All were acknowledged. Four of the five, JET noted, were past the stipulated response period. It has received none of the requested information.

“Four requests for internal reviews were then submitted to Chief Executive Officer, Peter Knight, and not one of these has received a response, almost four months later,” JET said.

This elasticity in the application of the law is not recent. And neither is it limited to NEPA.

Eighteen months ago, The Gleaner reported that it took the human-rights group Jamaicans for Justice (JFJ) half a decade to wrangle from the Government background documents relating to the Armadale Fire in 2009, which killed seven girls at the juvenile detention centre. An appeal tribunal in January 2022 confirmed JFJ’s entitlement to the information and ordered that the documents be released without deletions or redactions.

This was not all. JFJ reported that between April 2019 and October 2020 it filed 217 ATI requests. Up to the point of the report, more than two years after the last application, it had received “absolutely no response” to 39, or 18 per cent, of the requests. For another 82, or 38 per cent, JFJ characterised the requests as “unfulfilled”. Government agencies had not provided the information within the stipulated period or claimed it was not available.

POSITIVE SIDE

On the positive side, 44 per cent of the time, the agencies met their obligation within the time specified by the law.

The transparency group, Jamaica Accountability Meter Portal, too, has firsthand experience of the treacle-style movement for the ATI requests within some agencies. Last year, when it wanted to know from the Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation and the Department of Correctional Services if they had implemented recommendations by the auditor general for the award of contracts, it largely received silence for more than eight months.

Our arguments of 18 months ago for why the Government should change this dynamic and insist on strong and transparent adherence, with sanctions for bureaucrats who break the rules, remain as valid and relevant now as they were then. It is good politics and better governance.

Indeed, more than seven in 10 Jamaicans believe they live in a corrupt country. And politicians are regarded as the most corrupt group in the society, overtaking the police.

Further, nearly half of Jamaicans have no confidence in the legislature as an institution.

That is not good for a liberal democracy. It is the kind of circumstance that opens the way for disorder to thrive and for authoritarians and autocrats to find toeholds to power. That, of course, is not what Jamaicans want.