The Batasang Pambansa is an institution where the laws of the land are made and upheld in the name of freedom and independence. On a fateful afternoon – June 4, 2010 – it became a Pantheon of Shame, where the members of the House were allowed to go through “graduation rites” without passing the Freedom of Information Bill.
What makes it all sickening is that the House of Representatives is responsible for screwing the people out of freedom. An essential freedom: the right to know. What makes it even more appalling is that they didn’t do this out of a higher set of principles, but something much more base and banal: low drama, the fixation with parliamentary procedure, the lack of discipline, and simply not being there when a landmark piece of legislation is supposed to be ratified, for reasons that are best left to speculation.
In a system where almost every transaction with the Government is done under a sort of omerta, the Freedom of Information Bill is not just an accessory: it is essential. It is the enabling law that guarantees the Constitutional provision, gives it teeth. It does away with the code of silence that there is in every single level of Government. It does away with see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil: something so pervasive in the day-to-day affairs of Government.
Forget what kind of freedom is assured by FOI. Forget the willy-nilly and the nitty-gritty of what it contains, for now. In this supposedly free and independent nation that prides itself on having “the freest press in Asia” – or merely having guarantees to free speech that none of our Asian neighbors have – our august and honorable Representatives can, on a whim, deny us freedom. The fact that they did not attend the last session doesn’t just make them absentee legislators; that the FOI was not ratified for the lack of a quorum makes those august and honorable Representatives tyrants.
