The Ghana Right to Information Coalition has presented an options paper to the Parliament detailing improvements it says should be made to long-pending RTI bill.
The bill is before the parliamentary Select Joint Committees on Communications and Constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs. The Joint Committees held public consultations on the bill between July and August 2011 and in March 2012, conducted a review meeting “at which it was decided that certain key issues within the Bill needed to be re-visited or improved upon in order to bring the Bill in conformity with international human rights standards and best practices on the right to information,” according to the options paper,
The Coalition was asked to address a variety of topics: exemptions, private bodies, an independent Information Commission, fees, accountability measures for collecting and managing internally generated funds, an appeal process; and declassification of information.
The options paper, underwritten by the World Bank, was submitted May 21. A parliamentary leader blamed the Coalition was delaying action on the bill by not having submitted it earlier, a charge contested by Coalition leaders who pointed to parliamentary delays, including the failure to produce a report on last summer’s consultations. (See previous FreedomInfo.org report.)
Options Paper Addresses Many Issues
The options paper presents a “zero draft” that incorporates numerous proposals to reorganize the draft bill and to change wording in small and large ways.
For example,
Commentary: We are proposing generally that instead of the term ‘government agency’ we substitute wherever the term appears the phrase ‘public body/agency’. This is because ‘government agency’ has, in our view, a rather limited reach as compared to ‘public body/agency’ which is intuitively broad enough in its everyday meaning to encompass the reach of public bodies. Similarly the phrase ‘private body’ appears to be a simpler and more general term than private agency. Finally, most right to information legislation use the phrase ‘public or private bodies’. There appears in our respectful view, no compelling reason why the Ghana legislation should depart from this healthy tradition of right to information legislation. These definitions should be under the definition section in section 65 of the current Bill.
Establishment of an Independent Information Commission is proposed as an alternative to a system that would require that appeals be taken in the judicial system, noting, “Most Ghanaians would not have the money, determination, nor resources to apply for judicial review to the Supreme Court.”
Adjustments to the fee section, aimed at keeping costs down, also are suggested.
“Regrettably the time-lines for disclosure under the current Bill are unduly long and are likely to have the direct effect of undermining this right,” according to the option paper, which explains, “Currently, by virtue of the combined effect sections 23(1) and 26 (1) of the Bill, it may take 151 days, that is, over five months, for an application for information to be granted.”
Meanwhile, on the advocacy front, the opposition New Patriotic Party seems to have stepped up its criticism of the Mills administration for not advancing its accountability agenda, according to an article on MyJoyLine.
NPP communication team member, Nana Kofi Oppong-Damoah, said, “President Mills in his State of the Nation address in 2009 told the whole of Ghana that he’s going to address accountability and transparency using 3 major initiatives.”
“The first one was the Right to Information bill that has not been passed. The second one was the Ghana Broadcasting law that has also not been passed. The third one was the propagation of a code of ethics, we are yet to see that as well. So in terms of accountability, the track record of this government is zero. They have not done anything,” he argued during a television show appearance.
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