FOI Bill is dead, FOI practice lives

A BEND, one crooked bend in BS Aquino III’s matuwid na daan is the failure to pass the Freedom of Information Bill, a campaign promise – the passage not the failing – of the BS, echoed even louder just after his victory in 2010.

Today I stand aside and cede my space to the Right to Know. Right Now! Coalition in this the best articulation of the FOI Bill and the circumstances about its demise dated 20 August 2015.

THE FOI Bill is dead. We put the blame squarely on President Aquino and the leadership of the House of Representatives.

From our years of campaigning for the passage of the FOI Act, this we know for certain: without decisive support from the President and the leadership of the House of Representatives, the bill will not pass.

Benigno S. Aquino III led us to believe that it will be different under his administration. On at least two occasions before he took his oath as President, he promised that the passage of the FOI bill will be among his administration's priorities. In 2011, his government also joined the Open Government Partnership, a multilateral initiative led by the US that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to scale up transparency, accountability and public participation. We thought that he would see the urgency of passing the FOI Bill as an essential condition for Daang Matuwid.

Aquino is turning out to be no better than his predecessor on FOI. Now entering into the final months of his term, the Philippines remains the only one of the eight founding members of OGP that has not enacted an FOI Act. For all his administration's breast beating about transparency, President Aquino has not mustered the political will to honor his campaign pact with the people to assure the passage of FOI. Instead, early in his term, the promise of support turned into ever-mutating Presidential concerns over the FOI bill. Even after his concerns were addressed in the consolidated versions that emerged in Congress, we have not seen credible proof of his personal push for the measure.

The President's last SONA was a perfect opportunity for him to show a determined and sincere effort to pass the FOI. But for the the sixth and final time, he chose not to do so. Instead, his spokespersons point to a single sentence on FOI buried in page 38 of the 43-page Budget Message. If it can be included in the budget message, why can't it be said openly for all to hear in the 2-hour-long SONA?

Not foreseeing decisive action from the President's camp, what is difficult enough to accomplish at the House of Representatives has become even harder. We are witness to Speaker Belmonte's repeated promises on FOI that is not matched by action. The Speaker, under the rules, is the political and administrative head of the House of Representatives. He is responsible for the overall management of the proceedings of the House. He is primarily responsible for preparing the legislative agenda for every regular session, with the view of ensuring the full deliberation and swift approval especially of priority measures. Yet on the ground the Speaker has not lifted a finger to give FOI a positive push. On the contrary, Majority Leader Neptali Gonzales, the Speaker's chief enforcer, is already laying the basis for all excuses for FOI's non-passage. We can almost hear the tired and disingenuous refrain, "we tried our best, but we lacked time".

The Right to Know. Right Now! Coalition, in its more than 15 years of campaigning for the passage of the FOI Act, has held forums, issued statements, ran pooled editorials, participated actively in the legislative process, held mass actions, launched signature campaigns, held advocacy runs, filed its own bill by way of Indirect Initiative, produced information materials, initiated dialogues, and coordinated work with allies in Congress and the executive. We confront the reality that our institutions, particularly the Presidency and Congress, are not ready to overcome their selfish fears and take the side of public interest on the issue of FOI.

Under these circumstances, the coalition feels it unfair to continue to burden our House FOI champions with the expectation to take political risks in order to overcome the leadership's refusal to push for FOI. We thank them for their efforts to bring the FOI Bill to the point where it is clearly at the doorstep of the President and the House leadership. We will continue to provide assistance to them as best we could should they request for it, for whatever next moves they will decide to take.

While the FOI bill again meets its death in the hands of a President and a House leadership reluctant to redistribute power or too arrogant to heed our call, our fight for an effective, working, and living FOI, lives on. It may take a different form, emphasis and strategy, but its essence will remain the same: we assert the right to information as a fundamental mechanism in the struggle for a rights-based governance with greater transparency and accountability, less corruption, broader and informed peoples’ participation, and development outcomes that are sustainable and just.

For us this fight will now take the road of FOI Practice. In the past year, the coalition has already been systematizing the coordination and documentation of experience in our information requests relating to our respective advocacies. We will scale this up to include administrative and judicial interventions to address the problems that we thought Congress, with decisive push from the President, would address though a comprehensive and progressive legislation. In this fight we will also engage the constitutionally mandated independent accountability institutions, such as the Civil Service Commission, the Commission on Audit, and the Ombudsman.

Lastly, we will use FOI Practice to bring to the surface the real cause why our politicians have defaulted, copped out, or resisted the passage of the FOI Act all this time. As starting point, we are revisiting the 2007 to 2009 COA audit of PDAF. We demand that COA and the agencies that implemented the PDAF projects afford us access not just to the main audit report, but also to all the underlying paper trail to the transactions that COA has found anomalous, so that the people may fully see how we were defrauded of public funds.