Chief Justice Asoka de Silva has come forward, refreshingly, supporting the need for a Right to Information Law in Sri Lanka.
Such a law has been on the fire for nearly a decade now. It's been prepared, cooked, kept simmering, taken off the fire, then re-cooked and so on and so forth but never served on the table as a piece of legislation.

A Right to Information Law (which is also known in many parts of the world as a Freedom of Information Law) is not a law that only benefits the media. Fundamentally, it is a law that helps you - the citizen.

More than 40 countries, including India and Pakistan in South Asia, have this law. The law enables citizens to make an application to a Government ministry or department and obtain basic information about decisions that are taken in their name by the authorities.

They can ask why their child was not admitted to a particular school; why a promotion has been denied; how much is being spent for the construction of a road in their town, and who the contractor is and when it will be completed; who issued sand-mining permits in Puttalam, liquor licences in Embilipitiya and gem-mining permits around the Kalu Ganga - and who is responsible for the collapse of the bridges on the multi-billion rupee project on the Southern Highway.

A fortnight ago, reporters from this newspaper published their report on their investigations into the collapse of the bridges on the Southern Highway. They ran into a stone wall when they wanted to find out information which should otherwise have been in the public domain. Instead, they had to ferret out the information and even then there was resistance from the ministry down to the project engineer.

In advanced democracies they just cannot do that. Such information must be made available to the public. That is why there are so many rumours about corruption in high places in this country, partly unsubstantiated but partly true. It is the part that is true that Governments wish to hide from the public.

As the Chief Justice traced in a speech he made last week, a draft Freedom of Information Act was prepared by the Law Commission as far back as 2001. Then, in 2002 the Ranil Wickremesinghe Government appointed a committee comprising the then Attorney General, the Secretary to the Ministry of Justice, the Legal Draftsman and representatives of media groups with the Prime Minister himself in the chair. A draft bill was presented and approved by the Cabinet. The sudden dissolution of Parliament by President Chandrika Kumaratunga in 2004 prevented the passage of the bill through the Legislature.

Since then, the present Government has simply shown little or no interest in ensuring the law sees the light of day. One is constrained to ask, why. We are told a draft is lying somewhere in the Justice Ministry and the Media Ministry. It was appropriate that the Chief Justice advocated this law at a function organised by the Justice Ministry.

He said, "It is vital to ensure that transparency and openness in public decision-making will minimize the opportunity of other allegations such as bribery and corruption." He pointed out how media groups and civil society had laboured over the years to see the law through.

The very thought of releasing this kind of information would be anathema to corrupt politicians and public officials. But, as Aruna Roy, the lady bureaucrat turned rights activist who pioneered the law in India told a Colombo seminar this week, it was the bureaucracy that shuddered most when the law was introduced in that country, not the ruling party politicians.
These are progressive laws aimed at informing the poor; enabling the voiceless and the un-influential to access official information. Quite a lot of this information - not available officially, however can be obtained by greasing the palm of a clerk in a government department.

The Government, which claims to be a progressive one rather than turning the clock back and rekindling archaic laws like the Press Council Act in a bid to suppress the free flow of information, must look to implementing laws that are modern and empower the citizen.

As we mentioned in an editorial on the subject in July this year, "Colonial powers treated the people as subjects and had laws like the insidious Official Secrets Act to withhold official information from them. Today these countries are independent for more than 60 years…. Though the 2004 draft law was spearheaded by a media-based campaign, these are matters that civil society organisations in Sri Lanka with rural bases must campaign for, as was the case in India. The Government itself, if it is to be a genuine champion of the poor, must wipe off the dust from this draft law and accelerate its passage through Parliament".

Now that someone like the Chief Justice no less has emphatically proposed a Right to Information Law for Sri Lanka, we hope the Government will redouble its otherwise lackadaisical efforts in bringing forth such a law even if it is in the last days of the current Parliament. Bi-partisan support for it from the Opposition is almost a certainty.