Civil Society Organisation launches critique on RTI Bill

Accra, June 24, GNA - Members of Ghana Coalition on the Right to Information (RTI) on Tuesday, launched a 36-page book, which is a critique on the proposed Bill demanding an effective and clear-worded statute.

The Coalition, while acknowledging the recent review of the Bill by the Government Statute Law Commission, said "in our view there are still critical needs for further review to render the Bill in line with international best practice standards".

They observed that although the current Bill tried to comply with some of these principles, there were still certain provisions that were not up to the required standards hence the need for the critique. Professor Kwame Karikari, Executive Director, Media Foundation for West Africa, who launched the book at a two-day National Advocacy Training Conference for RTI Coalition members, said the review would enhance the full enjoyment of the right by the public when the law was enacted.

The RTI Critique also raised concerns about the procedure for accessing information under the Bill, which it considered was cumbersome.

The requirement for filing applications within strict time lines accompanied by fees were not in accordance with the principles of limited costs and applicant-friendly procedures and therefore needed to be reviewed, the Coalition said.

This in addition to the long timelines provided within which an application is dealt with, the least of which being 21 days and a further 21 days in case of a transfer of an application. "The general layout of the Bill is not user-friendly. The separation of related sections, for instance, the general right to information and procedure for access, makes it difficult for a reader to follow the provisions in a consistent manner. "This should be improved to enable ease of navigation by revising the chapterization of the operative provisions." Prof. Karikari said the peoples' right to access information had been widely recognized as an essential prerequisite for an effective and functional democracy in Ghana.

The critique is aimed at highlighting some of the key shortfalls in the current Bill that need to be reviewed to place it in line with best practice standards.

Prof Karikari said these standards as espoused by the United Nations included maximum disclosure, the obligation to publish, limited scope of exceptions, user-friendly access procedures, limited costs, open meetings, overriding disclosure principle, promotion of open government and protection of whistleblowers. In an interview with Ghana News Agency after the launch, Nana Oye Lithur, Africa Regional Coordinator of Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, said although the Bill contained a general right of access to information by the public, "this is limited in scope to information in the custody or control of a Government agency and not private bodies". She said Section 66 of the Bill did not adequately cover all public authorities in Ghana and should rather be substituted with "public organ" which would also cover chieftaincy institutions as well as such offices as Office of the President and Vice President. Instead, Section 64 of the Bill empowered the Attorney General to extend the coverage of this law to the private sector by Legislative Instrument.

"This in effect underrates the desired impact of the law by limiting it to a mere segment of public bodies and disregarding the integrated nature of public and private bodies in undertaking public service functions," Nana Oye noted.

She explained that enacting another legislation to cover private bodies ran the risk of creating unnecessary duplicity of laws and this was more likely to create public confusion on the procedural technicalities of information access.

"The underlying rationale is that whereas public and private bodies render public functions, people have no direct claim to information from the private sector save for that needed to enforce a legal right." The Coalition recommended that the Bill be revised to incorporate private bodies.

It also raised concern about the failure of the Bill to take cognizance of chieftaincy institutions that often served as public organ in Ghana and should potentially be bound by the provisions of the law to reflect the practical situation.

It said the Bill failed to underscore the principle of maximum disclosure as the overriding premise of the law, adding that the preamble fell short of explicitly highlighting the objective. The Coalition noted that the critique was to help Government understand the concerns of civil society organisations and also to make an input into the Bill.

"The Bill did not specify the commencement date of the law, which creates uncertainty and poses a dangerous likelihood of postponing the implementation of the law indefinitely.

"It must therefore, provide for a specific timeline for commencement and implementation of the operative provisions of the Bill as failure to specify a commencement date in the legislation itself can otherwise undermine the use of the law in practice."