Editorial | Deepening secrecy not good for trust

We are grateful that in the face of public pressure, the administration has, at least for the time being, shelved its plan to extend, by half a century, the period that official documents, including those on which the Cabinet bases its decisions, are kept secret.

But all Jamaicans who have a stake in transparency in public affairs must be vigilant against collusion between the Government and the Opposition, lest they slip through, during parliamentary review of the Access to Information (ATI) Act, the very amendment from which the authorities have been forced to retreat.

Without fanfare, or public signal of intent, the Government, through the de facto information minister, Karl Samuda, on Tuesday tabled a resolution in Parliament which, had it been approved, would have meant that instead of 20 years, the information in these documents would be under wraps for 70 years. When that law was passed in 2004, notwithstanding the initial reticence on the part of the government of the day, Jamaica joined the global trend of opening hitherto mostly secretly held documents/information to citizens who demanded to know. It was a way for people to hold their Government accountable for decisions taken and/or actions presumably done on their behalf.

There were, however, provisos. Certain classes of documents were exempt from automatic public access, including those whose disclosure officials felt would prejudice security, national defence, the conduct of international relations, as well as, among others, Cabinet submissions and deliberations.

Not only are the exclusions from the law too broad, but some of its language is sufficiently imprecise to allow resistant public officials to contort their way out of their obligations and weaken the law’s intent.

We had hoped, therefore, that the next time there were parliamentary deliberations on the ATI Act, it would dust off, and expand on, the joint select committee’s decade-old review of the law to make it more efficacious for the current environment, as well as building its resilience for the future.

Instead, there was Mr Samuda’s intervention, which, if entertained by Parliament, will be to erode the promise of the law and raise questions about the administration’s commitment to openness. Bluntly, it would be a backward step by the Government.

Indeed, when Jamaica legislated that a document’s exemptions “shall not apply after a document has been in existence for twenty years”, the island was, in this respect, ahead of some of its global peers. In Britain, for instance, the 30-year rule was in force, referring to the time it took before Cabinet documents, and other official ones, were declassified, unless especially exempt for longer periods.

Before 1967, the British classified documents for 50 years, which is still 20 years shorter than Jamaica’s current proposed exemption. Further, based on a review completed in 2010, Britain’s benchmark declassification will be after 20 years, which it has been working towards under a 10-year transition that annually sees more documents being released.

Varying benchmarks

In 2009, former US President Barack Obama ordered US agencies to speed up the declassification of government documents. The rule of thumb is that documents should be made public after 25 years, though agencies could retain them for longer in special circumstances. In the face of the global trend, Prime Minister Andrew Holness ought not to have been surprised that Jamaicans, who are already deeply cynical about honesty in public institutions, with 78 per cent saying corruption is a major problem in the country, questioned what his Government, and the political class, generally, had to hide.

Mr Holness has now divulged that his Government’s decision was in the face of requests of minutes of Cabinet meetings in 1975 and 1976, which leads to speculation that this, in part, is a search for information relating to the basis upon which the decision for the 1976 state of emergency was arrived at. That was more than 40 years ago. In any event, as Mr Holness acknowledged, the ATI law, at Section 23(1), gives the prime minister the power to issue a certificate declaring a requested Cabinet document exempt from disclosure once a reason is provided for that decision, which we expect is what he will now do. The Government’s initial grasp, however, was for the nuclear option – a long extension of the life of these documents in the purgatory of intransparency.

Maybe good will come of this misstep. A comprehensive review of the ATI Act, including the expunging of the archaic Official Secrets Act, is among larger, more forceful steps towards openness.