Liberating state information

There are at least three recent developments in T&T that have highlighted both our “culture of secrecy” and the impact of our freedom of information legislation.

I have selected just a few scenarios to highlight today, because they focus on actions initiated by three different players - a political activist, the media, and a regular citizen – all acting on their own behalf but with results that have positive implications for the rest of society.

Though mainly well-placed campaigners and a generally tenacious media are among the more frequent users of our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the intervention of Nadia Singh, mother of SEA top achiever, Anushka Singh, caught my attention.

This is so since I believe that while advocacy has routinely been left to media operatives and social and political activists, their main benefits are meant to assist regular folks in the conduct of their daily lives.

The other recent development we should not allow to pass unnoticed is GML journalist, Kejan Haynes’, exposé on unpaid fines associated with pandemic mask mandates between September 2020 and July 2022.

In the case of Kejan’s story, the FOI request was directed to the judiciary. Ms Singh’s application was made to the ministry of education. The third instance involved the police service and had to reach the High Court.

Perennial FOIA applicant, Ravi Balgobin Maharaj, had successfully challenged the refusal of the Office of the Commissioner of Police to publish mandatory FOI statements. The court made it clear that its failure to do so was in breach of a statutory requirement.

These examples are with respect to three public institutions that are provably problematic at different levels and for different reasons. But they are all significant custodians of official information.

There are, of course, other spectacular instances of the FOIA being put to use by people with a concern about transparency issues related to matters of public interest. I apologise for some significant omissions.

There is also frequently an international dynamic at play. For instance, non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) for the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines captured the attention of Transparency International when it studied 182 vaccine procurement contracts back in 2021.

In only 13 cases were such contracts publicly available, but heavily redacted on account of NDAs. There is a lot of room here for international collaboration on examining this phenomenon. Contrary to political messaging on the subject here, T&T was not the only country victimised by this practice.

Two organisations with which I am associated – the Media Institute of the Caribbean (MIC) and the Association of Caribbean MediaWorkers (ACM) – have invested considerable time and other resources over the years to get Caribbean legislators to work more seriously on bringing enlightened access to information laws to the parliamentary table.

The MIC recently launched two important resources to assist media, activists, and citizens interested in this field of endeavour. The first is a Freedom of Information Help Desk, which is a cloud-based, secure platform for journalists, civil society organisations, and private individuals seeking assistance with requests under their respective FOI/Access to Information laws.

The second is an advocacy toolkit that provides detailed guidance on both the strengthening of existing law and practices, and the enactment of legislation where it currently does not exist.

A slender majority of Caricom countries now have such legislation, and there is a clear need to have them fortified through application of a principle described under Article 13 of the American Convention as “the principle of maximum disclosure.”

In fact, while Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, Pedro Vaca, spoke at an MIC forum with Caribbean journalists on Monday, he specified conditions that needed to apply in order to satisfy such an aspiration.

There is insufficient space to discuss all of them here, but among the things he addressed was the acceptability of limitations inserted into the law or applied as official procedure. In T&T, legislators have gratuitously toyed with the concept in measures of knee-jerk prohibition.

The question of private entities involved in activities in which there are public interest concerns also arises. Our FOIA needs to more firmly address this. It extends beyond the requirements of corporate and commercial law.

There are sufficient examples of how our FOIA can work better on our behalf. There is evidence that people are more prepared now to use it when the need arises. This is a good thing. Anuska Singh’s will be among the names to be called if or when we eventually get this right.