Roperos: Information need

Monday, January 9, 2012

THE notion of freedom of information (FOI) has recently acquired a measure of optimism from the report that it has gained presidential support. But the matter did not acquire urgency, so it is said, because President Noynoy Aquino has not included it in his list of priority bills. Still, there is no mistaking the fact that public interest in the measure in Congress has been stirred in the face of recent events where the public’s need to know appears urgent.

The impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona has catapulted to a new high the public yearning for more information about the on-going event, especially since it has become a spin-off issue in the case of former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, whose performance in office has become a celebrated national, as well as international, concern. That the former president is now under “hospital arrest” has made the need for information about her even more urgent.

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But what, I believe, has made the freedom of information bill even more interesting is the rumored “new look” that the Senate committee on public information and mass media has endowed the FOI bill with. It seems that the Senate has a more interesting version that it calls People’s Ownership of Government Information (Pogi) bill. The Senate’s committee chair, Sen. Gregorio Honasan, said that the bill’s new name is “the Filipino slang for handsome,” and that in a democracy, information belongs to the people.

“The new measure ‘reverses’ the main requirement of the FOI bill, which is that a private entity would have to show in court why he or she needs a particular piece of information from a government agency in the event that the agency denies (the individual’s) request. Under the Pogi bill, it is the government that should explain before the court why it did not release the information.”

Honasan pointed out that “this principle is consistent with the fact that ours is a government of the people, by the people and for the people…This means that the people owns the government, including its information.” The Honasan committee is expected to present the Pogi bill in plenary, have it approved and reconciled with the House version, and then to the President for his signature “in the first quarter of the year.”

The proposed new version of the FOI bill sounds to me as more democratic and definitely more agreeable to the people in behalf of the national interest, as it decidedly tones down the possibility of politics acting as a sieve to filter the kind of information that the government would like the public to have.