Showing posts with label transparency. Show all posts
Showing posts with label transparency. Show all posts
, ,

Transparency fighters and the rejection of authority

Monday, December 20, 2010

 

What do whistleblowers, transparency fighters, file sharing activists and defectors have in common? They may all possess the same personality trait: a rejection of authority. According to Esther Dyson in project syndicate:

 

 

But you probably need to be a bit weird and callous to devote your life to transparency for others. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the imprisoned ex-CEO of what was Russia's largest oil company, is another example of a flawed, uncompromising person who challenged the flawed people in power and their unaccountability. Such people do not die for our sins; Rather, they sin on our behalf, so that we may live comfortably while they afflict the authorities at great personal risk and in disregard of (authorities' interpretation of) the law and sometimes even ethics.

Information is always used to impose and safeguard an established authority. Because knowledge is power, only the priest are allowed to read the scriptures. This is evident in the ancient Mayan civilization who restricts the ability of reading and writing into a small circle of elite class. The spread of the printing press in the European history allows the Bible to be studied by commoners and along with Luther’s writings, paves the way to protestanism, ending the Catholic church monopoly to human salvation in the Christian world. 
Within the psyche of these leakers – whistleblowers, journalists, spies-- whatever you wish to call them, is the hidden desire to achieve some sort of equilibrium and a resentment to authority. These people are anarchists.




 

, ,

Transparency leads to blackmail?

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

The Jakarta Post reported several months ago, that the State Audit agency (BPK) cease the publication of companies financial audit report due to blackmailing concerns. According to the article:

 

 

The Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) has stopped publishing online reports, to the dismay of freedom of information proponents. The agency said the state institutions it audited had complained that it was “too open”. BPK provided reports through the Internet even before the 2008 Law on Freedom of Information was implemented this year.

….

But reports of blackmail prompted the agency to close the online access, requiring information seekers to submit official letters to obtain a hard copy of reports. A public relations staffer of BPK, who requested anonymity, said, “The state institutions have been complaining that we were too open.” “[The institutions] said the reports had been used to blackmail them,” the source said recently.

Why fear blackmail if you are right? One of the possible reason is the corruption witch-hunt. The eradication of corruption in Indonesia is somewhat turning into a witch-hunt (a colleague in the UK is researching this for his Ph.D in Anthropology). Dealing with KPK and the Prossecutor office is cumbersome. This provides a disincentive for being transparent.

How do we handle this? Well, we need to provide more incentive for being more transparent. Transparency should not be used only for displaying the rotten apples of an organization, but also in highlighting the hidden jewels. This is what expert called a ‘targetted transparency’, which are conducted through, among other, publication of performance target benchmarked against certain a set of indicators.

 
Img source:mediaindonesia.com



 

, , ,

Human Right to Water and the Management of Indonesia’s Water Resources

Monday, December 13, 2010

I recently uploaded my World Water Week presentation’s background paper to the SSRN. The title of the paper is “The Potential Role of the Human Right to Water in the Management of Indonesia’s Water Resources”. In the paper, I argued that:
“…there are gaps in the Indonesian legal framework in securing transparency, access to information, participation, access to justice and the procedure in recognizing customary rights in water resources management. Without adequate access to these procedural rights, vulnerable, marginalized and financially weaker groups will be left out from water resources management and will not be able to secure their entitlements. The Human Right to Water has potentials for filling such gap by reforming the implementing regulation of the Water Resources Law and enhancing the possibility to obtain legal recourse”.

Colleague Hugo Tremblay reviewed this paper in his blog and commented “Reading the paper, it sometimes feels like the human right to water is constituted of a bundle of ‘substantive’ and ‘procedural’ rights (ex: see p.4 last §, as well as subsection 5.b on Right(s) to participation, transparency and access to information). Are these rights constituent human rights included under a human right to water? Are they considered as autonomous human rights? Is this an illustration of the doctrine of indivisible, inter-related and inter-dependent human rights?”

While the right to receive and impart information is recognized as a form human rights (Article 19 of the UDHR), the conflation of this right into ‘Freedom of Information’ has sometimes been contested. Although many argued that freedom of information is a human rights (see for example, this article from Toby Mendel), some skeptic may argue that the original intent of Article 19 of the UDHR is to protect free speech and not to provide specific access to governmental information.

Furthermore, the concepts of transparency, participation and access to justice is often mingled with ‘good governance’. A presentation from Susanne Schmidt of the UNDP asked a question: “Is IWRM an HRBA?” The present state of research appears to acknowledge that the two are ‘mutually reinforcing’ with the latter (HRBA) focusing on the equity aspect of governance. A joint working paper of several organisations even consider HRBA as a specific kind of ‘governance’.

I acknowledge that the concept of HRBA still needs further clarification. That, I will not deal in this post. I will reserve it for another day :)