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RTI two months old but public still face hurdles
View(s):Close to two months after Sri Lanka’s Right to Information (RT) law became operational in Sri Lanka, the continuing absence of a clear direction on the part of the Government’s implementing agencies is making it harder for citizens to access information, despite the law being ranked third best in the world.
The Government’s Right to Information website http://www.sundaytimes.lk/170326/, inaugurated with much fanfare by President Maithripala Sirisena recently contains some listings in English of Information Officers in a hard-to-search format in English but has no details of Designated Officers.
Under the RTI Act, while the information request must be filed to an Information Officer (IO) in a Public Authority, the first appeal must be to a Designated Officer (DO) in that same Authority. It is only after both these steps are exhausted that an appeal must be filed to the independent Right to Information Commission which is the overall policy making and appeal body under the Act. The Commission, operating from the BMICH, functions independently from the implementing agency under the RTI Act which is the Ministry of Media. The agencies that the Commission monitors in terms of their compliance with the RTI Act also include the Media Ministry itself.
In terms of Section 23 of the Act, it is mandatory for each PA to appoint an IO and a DO. In the absence of a publicly known official direction to that effect or as displayed on the RTI website, the PAs are informing information seekers that the head of the institution is the DO. But in many cases, ordinary citizens cannot get through to the IO concerned to obtain that clarification.
The RTI HelpLine run by the Sri Lanka Press Institute (SLPI) has been inundated with complaints by citizens who are not able to trace the relevant IO or are uncertain as to who the appropriate DO in a Public Authority is. The problem is aggravated by the fact that the information on the Government RTI website is not available either in Sinhala or Tamil which are the official languages. In some instances, the number of IOs on the Government website named as relevant to a Public Authority contradict the number of IOs in the actual Public Authority itself. Further, the information relevant to some key Pubic Authorities like the Ministry of Education is not in a searchable form.
Due to these hiccups, even Colombo based civil society organizations whose information requests had been rejected by the IOs have begun appealing directly to the RTI Commission, bypassing the mandatory step of first appeal to a DO. Under the RTI law, appeals of this nature will not qualify to be treated as appeals to the Commission and will need to be redirected to the relevant DO to be considered under the Act. All this will lead to further confusion, activists monitoring RTI implementation point out.
Meanwhile one notable use of the RTI law from February 3, 2017 has been by distraught parents seeking information regarding the admission of their children to national schools but who have been sent from pillar to post due to the fact that the relevant Information Officer to whom their requests must be lodged is placed at the Ministry of Education in Colombo. Information requests made by parents at leading national schools in Sri Lanka’s Southern Province have been rejected by principals who say that they are not the named IOs.
However in one example to the contrary, an enterprising parent Mrs. Subhani Wijemanna had insisted on the principal of a prominent national school in Galle accepting her request to obtain of details relevant to the rejection of her son’s admission to Grade 1. Following assistance from the SLPI HelpLine, her information request asked how many students had been allowed to be admitted to Grade 1 and how many children are admitted to Grade 1 under the category of Catholics, Buddhists, old boys etc. Mrs. Wijemanna had also insisted that the principal of the school hand over the information requested not in a handwritten form but typed and with the official seal of the school.
It was after the information had been given that she had realised that the strict percentages to be taken in under each category had been violated, thus resulting in an injustice to her child. Her intention is now to take the matter to court using that information to compel the school to act according to the law.
The SLPI has raised the question as to whether the principals of the relevant schools should not function as the information officers in the first instance and has been informed by government agencies that they will look into rectifying the matter as soon as possible.