A funeral, a fresh start: FOI dies
in Congress, FOI practice lives

By Davinci S. Maru

HUNDREDS of mourners marched on Wednesday afternoon from Manila’s Sampaloc district to Mendiola in Malacañang to bid goodbye to loved one.

The bereaved, clad in traditional black shirts, walked in paces behind a simple brown casket under the oppressive sun. But instead of dirge music, the mourners broke out in wild, staccato chants of pain and longing.

It looked like a typical funeral cortege, except that it wasn’t. The send-off ceremony was not for a beloved person but just as important, a cherished cause — the passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOI).It was a cause that the marchers has pushed in the last 15 years in the Philippine Congress. It was a cause that has died a slow death in a regime that calls itself “Daang Matuwid” or straight path.

The proposed legislation, which would have defined specific, clear guidelines for the citizen’s right to access information in the custody of government agencies has not moved past the Committee on Public Information in a Congress dominated by the Liberal Party coalition of of President Benigno Simeon Aquino III’s administration.

Atty. Nepomuceno Malaluan, convenor of the Right to Know, Right Now! Coalition, which organized the march, urged the marchers to turn their grief into rightful indignation. Instead of waiting hopelessly for Congress to pass the law — with just months to go to the May 2016 elections, he said the Coalition would turn instead to what he calls “FOI practice.”

That means, he said, the citizens and civil society organizations filing requests for documents and data, simultaneously, to demand greater transparency and accountability.

“Hindi ito ang katapusan sa ating paglalaban ng ating karapatan,” he said. (This is not the end of our struggle to assert our right to information.) The Right to Know Coalition of 160 member-organizations and individuals, will continue to assert their right to information, in whatever form, on matters of public concern, he said.

The FOI bill passed on third and final reading in the Senate on March 10, 2014. In the House of Representatives, however, the consolidated version of a counterpart bill has hurdled the vote of the Committee on Public Information but has yet to be reported out, and debated, in plenary on second reading.

The Philippines is the last of the eight founding member-states of Open Government Partnership (OGP), a multilateral initiative led by the United States, which has not enacted an FOI law, Malaluan said.

The FOI bill has not merited mention in the six state of the nation addresses that Aquino has delivered as President. It was mentioned, though, in a sentence in the Budget Message to Congress that Aquino submitted days later.

At the funeral march, the FOI advocates, fists clenched in protest, chanted: “FOI is dead, sinagasaan sa tuwid na daan.” (Run over on the straight path.)

Pallbearers carried the casket from across the gates of the University of Sto. Tomas to the gates of Centro Escolar University on Mendiola Street, a few meters away from the gates of Malacañang Palace. There, the casket was laid at its final resting place.

The Right to Know Coalition members offered a funeral spray and lighted candles. In a fitting send-off, they sang the classic Filipino song, “Hindi Kita Malilimutan” against a backdrop of three black-cloaked, scythe-wielding hooded figures. The grim reapers bore the smiling faces of Aquino, House Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr. and Majority Leader Neptali Gonzales II, the trio who, in the protestors’ view, caused the death of the FOI bill by sheer inaction and indifference. — PCIJ, August 2015