DESPITE President Aquino’s “appeal” to the leaders of Congress to pass the Freedom of Information (FOI) bill, advocates of the transparency measure gave up hope that the bill will be passed into law under the current administration.
“The FOI bill is dead. We put the blame squarely on President and the leadership of the House of Representatives,” the Right To Know, Right Now (RTK RN) Coalition, which composed of 19 organizations, said in a news conference on Thursday.
Vincent Lazatin, executive director of the Transparency and Accountability Network, said that President Aquino and the leaders of the lower chamber did not provide decisive support for the passage of the bill.
“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,” Lazatin said, citing the statement of the coalition.
He said the President made them believe the daang matuwid tack of President Aquino would lead to the passage of the FOI bill.
The FOI bill, which already passed the Senate and currently pending for plenary deliberations at the House, is pushing for greater access to public or government documents.
“On at least two occasions before he took oath as President, he promised that the passage of the FOI bill will be among his administration’s priorities. Aquino is turning out to be no better than his predecessor on FOI,” he said.
In 2011, the Philippines joined the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a multilateral initiative led by the US that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to scale up transparency, accountability and public participation.
“Now entering into the final months of his term, the Philippines remains the only one of the eight founding members of the OGP that has enacted the FOI Act. We have not seen credible proof of his [Mr. Aquino] personal push for the measure,” Lazatin added.
He also noted how President Aquino failed to push for the FOI’s passage in his six States of the Nation Address (SONA).
“[Instead] FOI buried in page 38 of the 43-page budget message. If it can be included in the budget message, why can’t be said openly for all to hear in the two-hour-long SONA?” Lazatin said.
In the same news conference, Nepomuceno Malaluan, coconvener of the coalition, said that, while the FOI bill again meets its death in the hands of President Aquino and the House leaders, the coalition fight for an effective, working and living FOI, lives on.
“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,” he said.
“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 constitutionality mandated independent accountability institutions, such as the Civil Service Commission, the Commission on Audit and the Office of the Ombudsman,” he said.
Malaluan said the coalition will use FOI practice to bring to the surface the real cause why the country’s politicians have defaulted, copped out, or resisted the passage of FOI Act all this time.
“As starting point we are revisiting the 2007 to 2009 COA [Commission on Audit] audit of PDAF [Priority Development Assistance Fund]. We demand that the 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 transaction that COA has found anomalous, so that the people may fully see how we were defrauded of public funds,” he added.
Members of the the RTK RN Coalition include the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, Social Watch Philippines, Partidong Manggagawa, Action for Economic Reforms, PAL Employees Association, Freedom from Debt Coalition, Filipino Migrant Workers Group and Father Robert Reyes.