The Office of Opposition Leader, Aubrey Norton says that Commissioner of Information Charles Ramson Snr is not appropriate for the role as he has not acted on requests for information.
In a release yesterday, Norton’s office said that on 13th February it dispatched to Ramson Snr, a “Request for Access to Official documents”, under the Access to Information Act 2011, requesting the radio and television programme logs of the National Communications Network (NCN) on its coverage of this year’s budget debate in the National Assembly.
The request was submitted to assess 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 release said.
It added that the Commissioner misinterprets several major aspects of the Access to Information law and 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.
The release said that this interpretation is flawed and finds support nowhere: neither in the stated intention of the law’s enactors (as can be confirmed by the Hansard of 15th September 2011), nor in the framework of the legislation itself, nor in the text of 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.”
The Office of the Opposition Leader said that nowhere in the wording of that section or anywhere else in the Act is a public agency required by law to provide documents and other information to citizens directly on request.
“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”, the release said.
The release said that Ramson blunders even more as his favourite line of defence is that his office is not a “warehouse of public information”. However, the release said that 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”, the release stated.
The Office of the Opposition Leader called for him to step down and be immediately replaced.
