When Mr Toby Mendel of the Article 19 group told members of Parliament at a seminar last month that it was an embarrassment for a country that presented itself as a democracy not to have a Freedom of Information (FOI) law he wasn’t saying anything that the MPs were unaware of. In his own eloquent words he got to the nub of the matter: the FOI law is the “oxygen of democracy”.
Indeed, without the FOI, democracy and all of its lustrous facets are at risk of being dimmed by secret, conspiratorial and opaque governance and we have plenty of that here. Without the FOI, good governance is entrusted to the aspiration that our leaders will evince Solomonic wisdom, openness and fairness. And in case they didn’t there would be institutions aplenty to enable the necessary checks and balances.
But what if those in charge divert from the track of good and fair governance while steadfastly denying this and employing the propagandist art to the nth degree? What if the institutions that are intended to enable the checks and balances are not properly resourced or are compromised in other ways? What then? How could a skeptical populace exercise their civic right in discovering how the government is shepherding the country and holding it accountable for its decisions? One way in modern democracies is by the FOI law.
