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The Office of the Leader of the Opposition, in a statement, has blistered Commissioner of Information, Mr. Charles Ramson Snr and said he is unfit for the office he holds.
Ramson is being accused of not understanding his role as Commissioner, the Office and the scope of responsibilities consistent with his role or deliberately misinterpreting or skirting responsibilities under the Act.
The Opposition’s contention is based on a information request for a log from the state-owned National Communications Network (NCN) of airtime given to the A Partnership of National Unity and Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC) Members of Parliament during the recent debate on the Budget.
The Opposition has accused the government of not allocating equal time as they gave the government’s Members of Parliament.
The full statement follows: –
CHARLES RAMSON SNR IS UNFIT TO HOLD THE OFFICE OF COMMISSIONER OF INFORMATION
On 13th February, we dispatched to Commissioner of Information, Charles Ramson Snr, a “Request for Access to Official documents”, under the Access to Information Act 2011, requesting the radio and television program logs of the National Communications Network (NCN) on its coverage of this year’s budget debate in the National Assembly.
Our request was submitted to assess for ourselves whether NCN fulfilled its obligation to the people of Guyana to cover the views and activities of the Parliamentary Opposition in a fair, equitable, and objective manner.
We have since received two responses from the Commissioner of Information. Both responses glaringly expose Commissioner Ramson’s wrong-headed interpretation of the Access to Information Act 2011, under which his office was established and now operates. His misreading of the law and his staunch defense of his wrongness has rendered the office ineffective, antagonistic and a disservice to the public.
Rather than continuing to directly engage Commissioner Ramson, we have decided to go public and thereby seek to prevent (i) the continued wastage of the $40M allocated in the 2023 budget for his office, and (ii) the demise of an important agency in the fight for transparency and accountability in government.
The Commissioner misinterprets several major aspects of the Access to Information law. Most critically, he erroneously believes that a citizen who seeks information from a public agency must first request and be refused that information by the agency BEFORE submitting a Request for Information to the Commissioner of Information. In other words, Mr. Ramson believes that his office acts as a fallback or a second resort.
But this interpretation is flawed and finds support nowhere: neither in the stated intention of the law’s enactors (as can be confirmed by reading the Hansard of 15th September 2011), nor in the framework of the legislation itself, nor in the text of any section in the Act.
Commissioner Ramson, however, relies on Section 13 (3) of the Act to insist that his office must only act as a second resort. Section 13(3) simply states:
“It shall be a constant endeavour of every public authority to take steps in accordance with this Act to provide as much information of its own volition to the public at regular intervals through various means of communication so that the public have minimum necessity to have recourse to the provisions of this Act to obtain information.”
But nowhere in the wording of that section (or anywhere else in the Act) is a public agency compelled by law to provide documents and other information to citizens directly on request.
Indeed, in Section 16(1), which outlines the “Procedure to make request” to the Commissioner of Information, no requirement is placed on citizens to describe (let alone, provide proof of) any failed attempt to directly obtain information from the public agency. Even more, the official request form in Schedule I of the Act displays no interest in such information. In sum, while a citizen may choose to apply directly to a public agency, the law does not obligate him/her to first do so—and be denied—before approaching the Commissioner of Information.
A proper reading of the Act and the Hansard would reveal as follows: that the Office of the Commissioner was established to deal with the situation where public agencies can treat direct requests for information from citizens with scant or no regard. The intent of the law, therefore, is to provide citizens with a statutory-empowered channel (the Office of the Commissioner of Information itself) through which they can make such requests as their first option. Indeed, Section 7 of the Act gives the commissioner the power to mandate a public authority to provide access to information, if so requested. It is that power, as our parliament envisaged, that would force public authorities to respect and comply with requests for info.
But Commissioner Ramson blunders even more. His favorite line of defense is that his office is not a “warehouse of public information”. But the law does not ask his office to store information. Rather, the law mandates him to act as a statutory conduit through which citizens can demand documents and data from public agencies.
Mr. Ramson’s misunderstanding of the law is so extreme that he also insists that an applicant must first verify for his benefit that the requested information is not available online or through any other source before his office can intervene. The Act places absolutely no such burden on citizens.
As the government continues to ignore its obligations to be transparent and accountable, Guyana needs the Access to Information Act to be properly interpreted and enforced. Charles Ramson Snr is not the man for the job. He is beyond reason and persuasion. He must therefore step down and be replaced forthwith by someone of competence as the Commissioner of Information.
