‘Swallowed’ reports

Editorial-August 20, 2014

Parliament was told on Tuesday that 17 presidential commissions appointed by President Mahinda Rajapaksa from 2005 to 2013 had cost the taxpayers Rs. 272 million. Chief Government Whip and Minister Dinesh Gunawardena, in answer to a question by JVP Leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake, MP said all those commissions save one had submitted their reports to the President. A question that went unasked was whether they had served any useful purpose.

Minister Gunawardena, asked whether those reports would be presented to Parliament, said the Presidential Commissions Act did not make it mandatory for them to be tabled in the House. The government and the Opposition, he added, should seek a common approach to amend the existing laws so that everybody could have access to such documents. Speaker Chamal Rajapaksa supported his view.

What one gathers from the remarks made by Minister Gunawardena and Speaker Rajapaksa is that though the existing laws do not require the Executive President to present to Parliament or release into the public domain presidential commission reports they do not prevent him from doing so suo moto.

The JVP Leader is one of the few parliamentarians who ask sensible questions in Parliament. He bowls toe crushing Yorkers to government ministers, who more often than not utter inanities and cut pathetic figures. He should be thanked for taking up the issue of presidential commissions, their costs and reports.

In the days of press censorship when some of the present-day champions of media freedom unflinchingly wielded the blue pencil and whimsically struck off chunks of our stories, the only way we could give vent to our anger was to leave spaces in the mutilated articles with the word, ‘censored’ prominently printed therein. The propaganda organ of the Communist Party, Aththa, went a step further and ridiculed the censors by printing ‘balla visin kana ladi’ (‘eaten by the dog’) in those places. Likewise, one may say of the presidential commission reports at issue:‘Janadipathi visin gilina ladi’ (swallowed by the President)!

The question is why the President does not make public those reports of his own accord without waiting till new laws are brought in or amendments are made to the existing ones to make it mandatory for them to be presented to Parliament. Now that the Chief Government Whip, the Speaker, the JVP Leader—and presumably all other MPs—having agreed in principle on the need to make it mandatory for presidential commission reports to be made public, let action be initiated to achieve that objective. After all, sovereignty is said to be in the people and parliamentarians, being their representatives exercising their legislative power, should be given access to such documents.

Respecting people’s right to information is a prerequisite for ensuring transparency which is one of the pillars of good governance. Governments may refrain from disclosing some sensitive information deemed classified for justifiable reasons such as national security. But, it defies comprehension why the reports produced by commissions whose deliberations are not confidential cannot be made public.

Most of the presidential commissions, under successive governments, have been like the run of the mill soap operas––disappointing from the beginning to the end. Worse some of them are even without proper endings! The practice of politicians using them as instruments to harass their rivals—the so-called Batalanda Commission being a case in point—has caused a severe erosion of public faith therein. But, since the people bear the cost of those expensive exercises they should be able at least to leaf through the voluminous commission reports most of which may leave them none the wiser. Let that be the bottom line.