MANILA (PNA) – Foreign businessmen on Monday threw strong support behind the ratification of the Bicameral Conference Committee Report of HB 3732 (Freedom of Access to Information Bill).

In a statement, the Joint Foreign Chamber (JFC) said that if the bill is passed into law it will not only provide a clear, uniform and speedy procedure for access to information of public interest but also improve the country’s competitiveness ranking.

It will set administrative, criminal and civil liability for violation of the right to information and provides proscription against excessive costs of access to information.

According to JFC, enactment and implementation of this important measure should improve Philippines ranking under the “Institutions” pillar of the World Economic Forum (WEF) “Global Competitiveness Report” and the “Government Efficiency” factor of the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) “World Competitiveness Yearbook,” the JFC said.

Enactment should also help improve the declining ranking of the Philippines in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index.

“Foreign direct investment in the Philippines is much too low, in part because of the perceptions of corruption in the country,” the statement said.

New investors frequently consult the corruption indexes when considering where to locate their overseas investments.

As of result of the declining ranking of the Philippines, many needed jobs that could have been created in the country have not been.

The Freedom of Access to Information legislation was first introduced in the Congress in 1992.

A coalition of lawyers, workers, journalists, farmers, religious leaders and advocates for transparency pressed on the 14^th Congress to pass the Freedom of Information bill when it resumes session on January 18 and immediately adjourns February 5 to pave way for the elections.

“It is in the hands of Speaker Prospero Nograles to support and pass the bill, which ensures our constitutional right to public information,” said Nepomuceno Malaluan, lead convenor of the Access to Information Network (ATIN) and the Right to Know Right Now (R2KRN), in a live radio interview with anchors Gerry Baja and Anthony Taberna over dzMM’s Dos Por Dos program January 11.

Malaluan said the Freedom of Information bill, which the groups have already lobbied for since the 11^th Congress, is crucial because it will provide a standard and definite procedure in dealing with requests for information. Requests submitted personally, by mail, or through electronic means, for instance, need to be complied with by government agencies in seven days, Malaluan said.

“We’re looking for commitment from the House leadership, which we have not found in Nograles’ recent statements,” Malaluan said. In recent news reports, Nograles announced 16 priority bills in the bicameral conference – but the Freedom of Information bill was not among them.

Only nine session days are left between January 18 and February 5 to hold the bicameral conference and approve the bill. After which, the Congress adjourns to give way to the national elections and resumes session on May 31, only for the proclamation of the new president.

Malaluan announced the groups’ series of activities to intensify calls for the passage of the bill. These include the simultaneous press conferences in Manila and Davao on January 18, when Congress resumes session. On the afternoon on the same day, R2KRN and ATIN members would hold picket rally in front of the House of Representatives along Batasan in Quezon City and seek audience with legislators.

When asked of the groups’ main calls to Nograles and legislators, Malaluan said: “We call on Speaker Nograles to lead the House to fully adopt the Senate version of the FOI bill to ensure its passage, or at the very least name the House representatives to the bicameral conference committee and immediately convene the same.”

Both houses of Congress already passed the Freedom of Information (FOI) bill on third reading (the House of Representatives in May 2009 and the Senate in December 2009), and now only awaits approval in the bicameral conference to become a final legislative act of Congress.

Malaluan also appealed to the public to support their actions for this bill. “Freedom of information will empower us all to plant seeds of irreversible governance reform in our country.”

This was the main message of Red Batario, Center for Community Journalism and Development (CCJD) executive director and Nepomuceno Malaluan, Access to Information Network (ATIN) lead convenor in a live radio discussion December 9 over dzMM’s “Dos por Dos” program with anchors Gerry Baja and Anthony Taberna.

Batario, who recently came from an international media mission to Maguindanao, said that while the massacre unearthed serious problems such as political violence and weakness of institutions to protect the people, it also underscored the attempt to impede the people’s right to information which helps people decide wisely and call for reforms on how their communities are run.

“Without clear access to information, democracy and the real exercise of people’s rights are compromised,” Batario said.

Malaluan acknowledged the Senate for passing December 7 on second reading the proposed Freedom of Information Act (FOI Act). He noted that the passage seemed to be “light” amid the dark cloud brought by the Martial Law declaration in Maguindanao two days earlier, raising apprehensions among the public that it would also be imposed in other parts of the country.

Left: Batario and Malaluan with radio hosts Anthony Taberna and Gerry Baha.
Above right, member organizations of the Right to Know Right Now movement
call on Senators to pass the FOI Bill

Malaluan said that when finally passed into law, the FOI Act will make the Constitutional right to know and the state policy of full disclosure if transactions involving public interest fully operable. Access to information has increasingly become complicated because of lack of standard procedures to deal with requests and the absence of a law clarifying the exact scope of the right to information.

The radio discussion coincided with two important events which both underscore the importance of right to information: the UN World Anti-Corruption Day and the International Day of Action against Impunity against journalists, falling on the same day.

One of the program hosts, Anthony Taberna, noted that the commemoration of UNCAC had become doubly significant because of the global action against impunity which can be linked to issues of corruption.

Malaluan appealed to the Senate to sustain the momentum by immediately approving the bill on third reading. “Under the dark cloud of Martial Law, we claim our freedom of information. Now more than ever we need to secure for the people the political rights that both empower and protect,” he said.

Formed in 2003 during the 12th Congress, ATIN is composed of 12 organizations and coalitions advocating for the full enjoyment of the public’s right to information guaranteed by the Constitution. It has been pushing the Senate to pass the proposed FOI Act before the 14th Congress concludes in February next year. Supported in part by the UNDP through the Fostering Democratic Governance project, the advocacy for the passage of the access to information bill has drawn broad multi-sectoral participation that now refers to itself as the “Right to Know, Right Now” movement.  Rorie R. Fajardo

(Note: The Senate passed the FOI Bill on third and final reading on December 14, five days after the radio program was aired nationwide and following two successive mass actions by the Right to Know Right Now movement.)

His family would rather that Gabriel were alive.

Last October, he was kidnapped and killed at the age of 37, even after his family had paid a ransom. It was only the latest in a spate of kidnappings of teachers in some parts of Mindanao that threatens to cripple education in remote, lawless areas, many of them teeming with bandits. But most kidnappings end with the release of hostages, unlike Canizares’ tragic fate.

Born and raised in Jolo, the capital of Sulu province, Canizares – or Bong, as his family and friends called him – grew up seeing the effects of conflict on the children of his province and dreamed of serving them as a teacher.

After college, the idealist fulfilled his ambition and was assigned to Kan-ague, a community in Patikul, a town not too far from Jolo but many times more dangerous. It’s a rural community where the Abu Sayyaf and other armed groups are often sighted. But it was precisely in impoverished places like Patikul that Bong thought he could make a difference, and perhaps one day help eradicate the roots of violent crime.

His family worried constantly, especially because Bong was a rare Christian in a predominantly Muslim community. But with his friendly demeanor, Bong became well-loved by the residents, often seen walking around villages with his trademark black bag and urging out-of-school youths to return to school.

In June 2006, he was promoted to principal of Kan-ague Elementary School at the relatively young age of 34. For three years, Bong lived the idyllic life of an educator, modestly paid but hugely compensated by the warmth of his host community.

But in the afternoon of October 19, 2009, what Bong’s family feared most happened. Armed men believed to be Abu Sayyaf bandits blocked the passenger jeepney Bong was riding and took him away.

Tragic fate

The next few days saw the Canizareses frantically trying to raise the PhP2 million-ransom (about US$9,500) the kidnappers demanded, an amount equal to eight years of Gabriel’s gross salary. But his family was only able to send PhP150,000 to the kidnappers.

On November 9, exactly three weeks after he was kidnapped, a sack was found in Patikul’s gas station. Inside was Gabriel’s black bag, which contained his head. It would be six days later before his headless remains were found buried in a bushy area in an
In a statement released to the media, the Department of Education (DepEd) said, “The entire DepEd family is shocked and grieves with the family of one of our best-performing principals. A key catalyst in teacher trainings with non-government organization Synergia in Sulu, Canizares is a great loss to efforts to improve the quality of education of our children in the area.”

The DepEd recently announced that Kan-ague Elementary School will soon be renamed Canizares Elementary School.

As of this posting, his killers have not been caught.

Easy prey

Canizares was the seventh teacher to fall prey to kidnappers this year.

On January 23, three teachers from Landangua Elementary School in Zamboanga City were kidnapped by armed men on board a boat. They were released on May 26.

But even before their release, three more teachers from Bangkaw-Bangkaw Elementary School in Naga town in Zamboanga Sibugay were abducted on March 13. They were released after six months of being held captive somewhere in the jungles of Basilan. Ransom was reportedly paid for their release.

Curiously, teachers are among the lowest paid professionals in the government yet are targets of kidnap-for-ransom gangs.

“Teachers are easy prey – helpless, visible and unprotected,” says Jose Torres Jr., author of the book Into the Mountain: Hostaged by the Abu Sayyaf. They also work in remote areas, like priests, social workers, journalists, and even jeepney drivers who are also being kidnapped. All of the above are professions not known for swelling the bank accounts of their practitioners.

But like priests and journalists, teachers make appealing targets because they make the news when they’re kidnap victims. With media attention, hostages become high-profile cases, encouraging kidnappers to raise the price for their return, Torres adds.

It is a dire illustration of the state of human rights in the Philippines. It is also one area of deep concern that human rights institutions and advocates have sought to address through various mechanisms including increasing public awareness.

Through a project called Fostering Democratic Governance supported by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Commission on Human Rights and its local institutional partners developed strategies to enhance the fulfillment of human rights in the Philippines. But obviously, the challenge is huge and daunting.

Preparing for the worst

After the series of kidnappings of his colleagues, Abelardo Brutas, principal of Lubigan National High School in Zamboanga City, would have armed himself by now, if he could only afford a gun His daily routine of travelling to and from the school on a motorcycle takes 45 minutes. In short, he is vulnerable to kidnappers.

A Bicol native, Brutas moved to Zamboanga City years ago when he saw an opportunity to teach there. With two bachelor degrees and a master’s degree from a university in Manila, he was quickly hired for the position he was eyeing.

But while Brutas is passionate about his profession, he wants to stay alive. “I’m afraid. If there’s another option for me somewhere else, I’d go,” he said. “No matter how much you love the place but if your life is constantly at risk, you will really begin to think twice about staying.”

Brutas’ sentiment is echoed widely by other teachers.

Benjo Basas, national chairman of the Teachers’ Dignity Coalition, says that these kidnapping incidents discourage teachers from serving in remote villages. “Nobody will teach. Children there will not be educated, which in the long term may become one of the reasons for them to rebel, or worse, to become bandits themselves,” Basas said. “This could be a bad cycle.”

With elections next year, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) is bracing for more kidnappings, a lucrative source of campaign funds.

AFP spokesman Lt. Col Romeo Brawner says the military and the police have been tightening security around schools and along roads leading to schools in arwas in Mindanao where kidnappings are rife. The effort has produced several successful stories of foiled kidnapping incidents. “But, of course, it’s hard to [watch over] each person 24 hours a day,” Brawner stated.

He added that military and police work in Sulu and other areas in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao is more difficult than elsewhere because kidnappers enjoy civilian support from relatives in the area who are often given a share of the ransom. Thus, Brawner observed, the fight can’t be done solely by government forces. He’s appealing to civilians to help protect teachers, because exposing them to harm will deprive children in remote communities of their only chance at an education.

The village of Kan-ague in Patikul, Sulu knows this only too well. When its tiny school is renamed Canizares Elementary School, the community will have gained a memorial. But it lost a devoted teacher forever. – FVI/HGS/GMANews.TV

The west has a simple test of democratic virtue – the holding of elections and the protection of personal liberties. But is it really that simple?

More than 10 years after the end of the cold war, the paradox of “people’s power” grows clearer by the day. Democracy, in the sense of a popular uprising against a faulty system of government or a hated individual ruler, can produce “regime change”. But it takes more than the toppling of a ruler or even a system to produce democracy.

Democracy, in other words, has a narrow and a broad definition. If you want to build a public climate of tolerance and debate as well as new institutions to hold politicians and government officials per manently to account, elections are not enough.

In some cases they may not even take democracy forward, if they come too soon. In the Balkans, western politicians, acting under American influence, rushed into elections in Bosnia. The results, at local and national level, merely entrenched the existing power-holders, almost invariably hardline nationalists and in some cases war criminals. In the central Asian republics and the Caucasus, elections have frequently been used by authoritarian leaders as a veneer to hide the repressive nature of their rule.

In recognition of these points, the US state department now includes a relatively wide set of indicators in its annual reports on human rights around the world. But the core of US thinking remains what it always was – an assumption that the liberties enshrined in the American constitution plus regular elec tions are the cornerstone of democracy.

Many Americans also hold the view, enhanced by the collapse of their only global competitor, the Soviet Union, that the whole world is moving forward seamlessly in “transition to democracy”.

Implicitly challenging this self-serving view, there now comes a formidable new Handbook on Democracy Assessment. Sponsored by the Swedish government-financed Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (Idea)* and edited by four British academics, it develops the concept of the “democratic audit”, which was done for Britain three years ago. As Stuart Weir, one of the authors, puts it: “Countries progress and regress, and sometimes do both at once. Progress towards democracy is far from being a universal goal even in those countries which have adopted electoral politics.”

The handbook aims to promote a universal methodology available to citizens within a country to measure the state of democracy in their own societies.

Internal self-assessment is preferable to outside supervision and the patronising assumptions or downright interference which often go with it. Locally generated benchmarks are likely to be more legitimate. They include the expectations which people have from their governments as well as the targets which government ministers themselves set. These differ from country to country depending on history and traditions.

Idea’s approach avoids league tables in which countries are graded against each other. The authors do not rule out international comparisons but say it is better to compare countries in the same region or ones which share a similar period of time since the end of authoritarian rule.

Comparison then becomes an aid to learning rather than a competition. Democracy, in the Idea view, involves popular control and equality, and the key value in ensuring it is participation. Elections are only one of a range of means for realising it. There also has to be a guaranteed system of civic, economic, social and political rights, as well as education for citizenship. There has to be a culture of participation, and people need the capacity and resources to take part.

Professor Weir and his colleagues looked in detail at Bangladesh, El Salvador, Italy, Kenya, Malawi, New Zealand, Peru and South Korea. Assessing a wide range of values, from minority rights protection and laws on freedom of information to executive decentralisation and media independence, they propose a framework with global applicability.

There are lessons for every country. Those with a history of ethnic or communal intolerance need to be measured on the scale of “solidarity”. Unless there is respect for cultural diversity, politics degenerate into a winner-takes-all mentality. Meanwhile, western countries which pride themselves on long traditions of representative democracy need to be measured on the scale of “responsiveness”. The UK may feel less complacent about its democratic accountability when it looks at its relative position within Europe on women’s participation in parliament (see graphic).

The thinning-out of western democracies, which have seen a long-term trend towards ever lower electoral turn-outs, is partly due to despair over low standards of executive accountability, but also to the failure of elected representatives to respond to many citizens’ real concerns. By this measure, though the authors do not express it in these undiplomatic terms, there is a continuum between the election in Zimbabwe and the contest which ended with George W Bush in the White House.

Neither Zimbabwe nor the US have much legitimacy in criticising each other. Both fell a long way short of their own targets: flaws in compiling complete voters’ rolls, excessive use of state and private finance to distort access to the media, low public faith in the relevance of the contest, and manipulation of the counting procedures. (Source: The Guardian)

*The Handbook on Democracy Assessment (Kluwer Law International), will be launched at Portcullis House, Westminster tomorrow. Contact: Andrew Holden at Charter88 on 020 8880 6088 or email

The International News Safety Institute urges journalists in the Philippines to resist calls to carry guns following the horrific massacre in Maguindanao.

INSI believes that the safety of journalists would not be improved, and in fact probably would be diminished, were they to carry weapons.

“Journalists increasingly are being targeted largely because they have lost, in the eyes of certain elements, their status as neutral observers. If they bear arms they reinforce this misguided belief by placing themselves on one side or another,” said INSI Director Rodney Pinder.

“A journalist with a gun says some people in the situation I’m covering are my enemies and I am prepared to kill them if necessary. That is not the position of a neutral civilian.”

Most importantly, journalists who carry arms may remove themselves from the protection afforded to civilians in war by the Geneva Conventions.

Article 79 of the 1977 Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions says: “Journalists engaged in dangerous professional missions in areas of armed conflicts shall be considered as civilians… They shall be protected as such under the Conventions and this Protocol, provided they take no action adversely affecting their status as civilians…”

INSI and other organisations concerned with the safety of journalists in conflict believe that the bearing of arms would amount to that action.

Journalists and assignment editors considering such a move might wish to address some practical questions and issues:

• Suspicion may fall on all journalists covering a dangerous area if some are armed, perhaps increasing the likelihood of their being targeted. It is similar to the arguments raised over arms in the home – is a burglar going to be deterred or more likely to carry a weapon too? Guns tend to attract guns.

• What if a colleague or, worse, an innocent bystander, perhaps a child, is killed by a journalist?

• What if a journalist panics and opens fire in the midst of an angry mob?

• What is the effect on your legal liability and insurance and the insurance of the company?

• Might a gun in your belt encourage you to go some place it otherwise might have been prudent to avoid?

• If the situation is so dangerous that a weapon is considered vital protection, should you be there at all?

And finally:

• Are you prepared to kill to get your story?

Chino Gaston
GMA News Reporter

Aira B. Corpuz, 14
High School Freshman
Dominican College, Sta. Rosa Laguna

Cheryl Ingles