House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez on Sunday said that passing the freedom of information bill is no longer possible this year because Congress will be busy with budget hearings and with committee memberships for the rest of 2016.
This developed even as President Rodrigo Duterte issued an executive order in July operationalizing FOI in the executive branch of government. Mr. Duterte said he hoped this would prompt the other branches to follow suit and come up with FOI measures in their respective spheres.
The executive order invokes the people’s constitutional right to information and the state policies of full public disclosure and transparency.
“I have no problem with the FOI. It’s just that the committees are not yet complete now,” Alvarez said.
The leader of the House apparently believes that an FOI Law has waited so long that it can afford to wait a little more. After all, despite the fact that the right to information is enshrined in Section 28, Article II of the 1987 Constitution, no enabling law has been passed even as the first bill was filed as early as 1987.
Sure, Congress is set to deliberate on the 2017 budget and P3.35 trillion is not an amount to trifle with. House committees also need to be filled so that the 17th Congress can begin its work in earnest.
Then again, lawmakers will not spend every waking moment taken up with the budget and the committee memberships. If they indeed believed that the FOI bill was important or urgent enough, they would find the time to deliberate on the FOI bill and muster a quorum to vote on it. Over the years, we have seen members of Congress pull stunts that defied the odds if they deemed a measure truly important—or if it served their purpose.
The “straight-path” treading administration of Benigno Aquino III failed spectacularly in delivering on this campaign promise, even as it claimed to create a transparent environment in the government. The Senate, for its part, passed the measure, but the House cited several reasons for its inability to do so.
This is exactly why Speaker Alvarez’s words give us the same uneasy feeling.
