The African Commission on Human and Peoples� Rights has adopted a model law to inspire and guide African legislators to enact access to information legislation, to usher in an era of greater openness.
The African Commission officially launched the �Model Law on Access to Information for Africa during its 53rd Ordinary Session in Banjul, The Gambia.
A statement to the Ghana News Agency in Accra, at the weekend, said the model law aims to guide national legislators in �converting� or �transforming� the open-ended formulation into detailed legislative provisions.
It also allows for an effective national system for accessing information, held primarily by the states, but also by private entities performing public functions. The model law remains what its title proclaims, a model to be adopted and adjusted to suit the specific national circumstances and conditions of particular states.
The statement also acknowledged that access to information was a relatively complex and specialised subject field, in which states often have insufficient experience and expertise.
The rationale for the Model Law, therefore, lies in the imperatives of democracy and good governance.
The model law is the product of a two and a half year-long drafting process, coordinated by the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria, under the auspices of the Special Rapporteur.
According to the statement, several expert meetings were held, which resulted in the establishment of a ten-member working group of Access to Information (ATI) experts.
The experts, tasked with developing an initial draft of the Model Law, presented a draft to the African Commission at its 49th Ordinary Session held in Banjul, The Gambia, in April 2011.
To ensure further and more in-depth consultation with stakeholders, between June 2011 and June 2012, four sub-regional consultations were held in Mozambique, Kenya, Senegal and Tunisia, to elicit feedback on the draft Model Law.
According to Frans Viljoen, Director, Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria, the roots of the Model Law lay in the African Charter on Human and Peoples� Rights and, more specifically, in articles 1 and 9.
�Article 1 places the obligation on all state parties to the Charter to give effect to the rights in the Charter, including through legislative means, that is, by way of domestication. �One of the Charter provisions that need to be domesticated, is article 9, the right to receive information, referred to as the right of access to information,� the statement quoted.
According to the statement, in a participatory, people-centered democracy, information should not, as a rule, be viewed as �secret�, and as only accessible to the citizenry at the unguided discretion of officials.
Rather, information should be made as freely available as possible, to enable the people � who are after all the chief stakeholders in a democracy � to participate in the democratisation process to hold government accountable, and ultimately, to exercise informed democratic choices.
In other words, the adoption of access to information legislation signals a shift towards a state and society, where the fall-back position is that information is available, unless valid reasons for security or confidentiality exist, and not the other way around.
On good governance, the Model Law noted that access to information was an instrument of good governance, and may play a role in poverty eradication and the realisation of socio-economic rights.
Openness is a tool to combat governance ills such as corruption, secret deals between government and multi-national companies (MNCs) to sell off land, and misappropriation of taxpayers� contributions.
The implementation of access to information legislation is also likely to lead to improvements in record keeping and archives, which are critical elements of good governance.
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