Cape Town -
It looks good on paper, but the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) is failing and less than 16 percent of requests for information in a year were successful, the Right2Know (R2K) Campaign says.
The organisation released its Secret State of the Nation Report 2014, a snapshot of some key trends that it said pointed to an increasingly secretive state and increasing politicisation of structures.
Murray Hunter, one of the authors, said the group had looked at a number of key indicators, such as how open state institutions were.
While the PAIA law looked good on paper, it was failing as a mechanism for the government to release information to citizens.
Although R2K had found that civil society groups were using this law more often, the number of times their applications led to the release of information had dropped from 35 percent in 2008/09 to 16 percent in 2012/13.
“PAIA is a massive pain which in many ways results in obstacles to information,” Hunter said.
Another indicator - the level of secrecy in government departments - showed that some departments would not even say how many documents they had classified as secret.
“They said, ‘The number of documents we make secret is itself secret’.”
Others said they did not know. The Department of Higher Education said it had classified 389 documents as secret.
The report said the public’s right to protest was a litmus test of freedom of expression and democracy, but this appeared to be under attack.
“As the rate of community protests around the country appears to be rising, police brutality has increased sharply, suggesting that freedom of assembly is under threat,” it said.
This year, seven people had been killed by police during protests.
Eleven protesters were killed by police last year, 37 in 2012 at Marikana and five in other protests; 10 in 2011 and three in 2010.
Statistics released by the Independent Investigative Directorate showed an increase in the incidence of assault by police during crowd control, from between one and four cases between 2002 and 2008, to 44 in 2009, seven in 2010 and 24 in 2011.
The Regulation of Interception of Communications Act (Rica) requires a judge’s warrant to monitor communications. “The facility which ‘listened in’ to people’s communications reported to Parliament in 2010 that it had made about 3 million interceptions over three years, during which time only 882 Rica warrants had been authorised.
“So each warrant may represent thousands of interceptions, or else surveillance is happening without a warrant,” the report said.
Roegchanda Pascoe, on R2K’s national working group, said that as an activist working in Manenberg, it was extremely difficult to get information from the government - even about something as simple as the allocation of housing.
“As an activist on the ground, where is the democracy?” she said.
The report is online at www.r2k.org.za/secrecy-report-201
Cape Times