Editorial | Liberate information

Robert Morgan, the information minister, needs to explain why the Government finds it so difficult to get a move on reforming Jamaica’s Access to Information Act (ATI).

It is heading towards 14 years since a joint select committee of Parliament issued its report and recommendations on a review of the law, and almost two years since Mr Morgan said that he ordered an analysis of that document, ahead of seeking the Cabinet’s approval for another parliamentary committee’s evaluation of the legislation. Last August, Mr Morgan reported that his office had already sent related documents to the Attorney General’s (AG) Chambers for their comment and advice.

It is not clear what, definitively, the AG’s office was expected to provide. But even if its evaluation was deemed necessary, it ought not, from our vantage point, to have been all that complicated. It isn’t as if Mr Morgan’s staff and the AG’s department were being asked to radically redesign the wheel from being a cylindrical apparatus, on whose functionality the Cabinet is to pass judgement.

So while policymakers wend their way through the process, government ministries, departments and agencies continue – insofar as they can get away with it – to weasel their way out of providing information that should, of right, be available to citizens. Often, they obfuscate and play three-card tricks with the information that they ostensibly provide.

While Jamaica should rightly celebrate its recent improvement on Reporters Without Borders’ freedom of the press index – moving eight places, from 32 to 24 – two developments highlight that while Jamaican journalists are not subjected to the violence and overt harassment faced by colleagues in other countries, attempting to access information on how public officials utilise taxpayers’ resources is often a fraught exercise. The incidents underline, too, why an overhaul of the ATI, and other transparency-related legislation (as was suggested in the 2011 report), is necessary and urgent.

PRIVACY RESTRICTIONS

Take the first of the cases – the matter of Tax Administration Jamaica (TAJ) – the Government’s collection arm – and its lease of properties in the parishes of Manchester and St Mary.

According to an appraisal by the auditor general released earlier this year, over three years the TAJ spent over J$400 million in rent and related costs for the properties without occupying them. Apparently, government procurement regulations slowed TAJ’s ability, the agency claimed, to retrofit the buildings.

TAJ may well have a strong case vindicating its actions. It is nonetheless concerning that it declined to reveal the names of the lessors to this newspaper, on the claim that it was prevented from doing so by the recently promulgated Data Protection Act (DPA). However, that law, on its face, allows for the release of even protected information, once its publication is deemed to be in the public interest.

Ironically, Norman Dunn, a government MP and minister, and one of the lessors the tax administrators wanted to keep in wraps, independently confirmed his ownership of the St Mary property. Further, although the Office of the Information Commissioner, the overseer of the data protection rules, publicly declared that there was no hindrance to TAJ release of the information under the DPA, the agency is apparently still consulting on the matter.

This newspaper, therefore, repeats its call for it to be placed beyond doubt in the DPA that information about government contracts is inherently in the public’s interest and, therefore, except in the most extreme circumstances, not subject to privacy restrictions.

Then there is the case of the Government’s National Land Agency (NLA) and its slithering contortions over if, and how, it received permission from the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service (which controls public-sector hirings) to remove a critical qualification for some of its seniors posts. It has been implied that the move was to accommodate a specific applicant for a top post. The appointment was reversed when the finance ministry held its ground that it had not granted permission to adjust the minimum requirement for the job, and an overlooked candidate appealed.

Initially, NLA flatly refused to comment on the matter. But subsequently, in an attempt to attack The Gleaner’s reporting on it, NLA released partial information that, at best, served to confuse and misinform citizens.

The behaviour of TAJ and NLA, this newspaper holds, supports the position of the need (which was not supported by the 2011 parliamentary committee) to change the conceptual framework of the ATI law: moving from a notional right to access information to a default of an inherent freedom to information.

Everything should be built around that idea. The Access to Information Act should become the Freedom of Information Act.

The 2011 report addressed the question of making the law more compatible with the digital age, where documents are more likely to be produced electronically than on paper. It also raises questions and makes recommendations on a raft of other issues, ranging from the time ministries, agencies and departments take to respond to or comply with information requests, to the basis on which denials can be appealed, and whether policy advice by public officials should be public information.

The point is, that report provides a good starting point for the new review promised by Mr Morgan. Which should begin now, rather than with the next Parliament. Fourteen years is already too long a time.