Draft freedom of information legislation for Fiji is too restrictive, a witness recently told a parliamentary committee, the Fiji Times’ Aqela Susu reports.
Bill No. 34 (text) being considered by the Parliamentary Committee on Justice, Law and Human Rights “is based on the notion that the citizen is an alien who is not to be trusted and will be given minimal or no information at all,” testified Pacific Dialogue chairman Jone Dakuvula.
“Mr Dakuvula told the committee the Bill was all about restricting citizens’ access to official information and shielding ministers and officials from accountability to the citizens of Fiji,” the Times reported.
“The citizen should not need to justify why he or she must be given the information,” Dakulvula said.
The draft requires that requesters show that the requested information “directly affects” them. The bill elaborates:
(4) For the purposes of this Act, information “directly affects” a person if the information is about the person or a determination or decision made by a public agency regarding the person making the request under this section, provided that information relating to the determination or decision of a public agency or an approval or authorisation granted by a public agency to a person does not directly affect another person (“second person”), or a determination or decision regarding the second person, merely because the public agency has denied or refused an application, approval, claim or request made by the second person.
The list of exemptions concludes with a general one:
(0) any other information, the disclosure of which, the Commission deems is not in the public interest.
The bill also has been criticized by the Fiji Labour Party, the newspaper wrote Aug. 13.
Party leader Mahendra Chaudhry said:
We submit that this constitutional right must not be diminished by subsidiary legislation except in situations where national interest may be impaired as a result of the information being made public. We, therefore, propose that the right to access information be open to all official information and documents held by government and its agencies as provided for in the Constitution and that the Act make adequate provisions to facilitate this requirement.
The NGO Coalition on Human Rights has welcomed the country’s Freedom of Information Bill, according to an earlier Fiji Times bfief.
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