Fresh Air

Publicising the work of the Executive Council:  The historical lack of transparency in the government of Anguilla is not so much a constitutional flaw, but a public relations disaster.  There is no organized and systematic disclosure to the public by any government press officer of the work of government, particularly of the Executive Council.   

        Sporadically, the Governor discloses some development that is of interest to him.  Very occasionally, the Chief Minister drops a hint or remark about the workings of government.  All the rest of the workings of the government of Anguilla is left to the rumour mill.  Only when there is a crisis or an emergency in government is any effort made to give out information.  That information is usually biased in the direction desired by the person delivering it.

We will all remember the recent history of government press conferences.  Chief Minister Hubert Hughes started them during his administration in about the year 1988.  None had existed previously.  They came to an end with the advent of Chief Minister Osborne Fleming’s administration in the year 1990.  No doubt Mr Fleming felt that such press conferences had become discredited because of the abrasive and destructive way in which they had been conducted. 

Mr Fleming resumed holding Chief Minister’s press conferences in about the year 2007.  It did not take long, however, for Mr Fleming’s press conferences to descend into pure politicking.  The weekly Chief Minister’s press conferences provided some public entertainment until the end of the administration in early 2010.  While they were not as abusive and destructive as they had been under the previous administration, they were widely recognized as being purely political.  No useful information on the workings of government or the decisions of Executive Council was ever released at these press conferences.  Now that he has taken over the administration, Chief Minister Hubert Hughes has resumed giving his weekly press conference in his own inimitable style.

These press conferences are not what are needed in Anguilla.  Besides providing entertainment, they serve a political purpose.  But the people are entitled to be informed about the workings of their government.  We need to have a regular weekly release of information on the major decisions of the Executive Council and on the steps the administration is taking to implement government policy.  It is high time for us to begin insisting that Ministers must expose the workings of their Ministries and Departments to the people. 

Frequently, Ministers go for years without reporting to the House of Assembly on the workings of their Ministries and Departments.  If no member of the Legislature complains, who can blame the Minister for keeping quiet about what he and his Ministries are doing? 

All of us in Anguilla remember the low opinion we held of what was then perceived as a secretive, remote and probably abusive police force up until 2007.  That was the year that Police Commissioner Keithley Benjamin introduced the weekly police press conference.  The result of this opening up to the press and public has been nothing less than an astounding turn-around in the public’s attitude to the regular requests of the police for cooperation from the public.  It is incomprehensible to me that this refreshing transparency has not been transferred to the work of the Executive Council. 

We should insist that the Executive Council meetings are opened up to the public whenever possible.  Is it only the “white” Overseas Territories of the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar that have the self-confidence to hold a press-conference immediately after every cabinet meeting to inform the public and publicise what decisions have been made in the public interest?

To summarise then, the solution to the perceived lack of integrity, accountability and transparency in our small-island territories of the West Indies is largely due to deficiencies in our Westminster Model Constitutions.  These Constitutions typically provide for the forms of government, but do nothing to establish mechanisms that ensure checks and balances on abuse of power.  The solution is to insert into our Constitutions, whenever we get the chance, the proven mechanisms that have been developed in other parts of the world that will ensure that best practices are followed.

Related Posts:

Policing

Secrecy

Annoyed

Executive Council

Hush-hush

Other committees and commissions:  The 1982 Constitution of Anguilla contains provisions that offend against transparency.  In particular it provides for the arbitrary and one-man execution of some of the processes that in a democratic country should be handled by independent local institutions. 

Let us take the absence of a Mercy Committee as an example.  At present section 76 gives the Secretary of State acting through the Governor the sole power to grant a pardon, either free or subject to conditions, to a convicted person.  Anguilla is not unique in this respect.  In most of our territories, the Governor has the Constitutional power to function without any local Mercy Committee to advise him on what to do.  Whenever the prerogative of mercy is exercised in the fashion prescribed by the Constitution, legitimate doubts will arise as to its propriety.  The question will be asked, what does a foreign politician or diplomat know about who in our prisons should have his sentence shortened or commuted?  The suspicion will be that he has relied on the advice of some unknown advisers lurking in the darkness around him.  The result is that no sensible Governor is likely ever take the risk of exercising the power, even in the clearest of situations.  It is either that or be prepared to face personal doubts and attacks over his motives if he ever does exercise it.  This is a most unsatisfactory state of affairs. 

The absence of a Boundaries Commission to ensure transparency in the placing of electoral boundaries to the various political constituencies is another vexed issue.  In some of our islands there has been no Boundaries Commission appointed for centuries.  As demographics have shifted, some of our electoral districts have become a small fraction of the size of others.  Good government demands that our people have more or less equal representation in the House. 

Related posts:

Mercy Committee

Electoral Boundaries

Wikileaks

A correspondent has sent me the following interesting story on Wikileaks, Julian Assange, IMMI and The TCI Journal:

A real free press for the first time in history

July 12th, 2010 Posted by Joel Gunter

Julian Assange, editor of whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, has criticised mainstream media for not making proper use of “primary resources” and claimed that the site has created “a real free press (…) for the first time in history”.

Speaking at the Centre for Investigative Journalism Summer School at City University London on Friday, Assange accused the media of failing to consult important evidence in its reporting of a 2007 US Air Force strike that killed two Reuters news service employees and several Iraqi civilians

Julian Assange

The attack became infamous after a video of the event was leaked through Wikileaks, entitled Collateral Murder. The footage was recorded by one of two Apache helicopters involved in the attack.

Showing an alleged copy of the US Military’s 2007 rules of engagement hosted on Wikileaks, Assange said: “We had the raw ingredients you needed to decide right there. Why didn’t they use them?

“No one can be bothered to look up the term ‘positive identification’ to see what it actually is.”

Assange argues that it is clear from the document that the Apache pilot broke the rules of engagement. He said journalism needed to work towards making more primary source material such as this available online, arguing that this was the standard process for scientific investigations and that it should be the same for journalism.

You can’t publish a paper on physics without the full experimental data and results, that should be the standard in journalism.

You can’t do it in newspapers because there isn’t enough space, but now with the internet there is.

Last week, Private First Class Bradley E. Manning, who is accused of leaking the video along with tens of thousands of classified State Department cables, was charged by the U.S. Army with mishandling and transferring classified information. Assange will not attempt to enter the US for fear he might be subject to a subpoena.

Citing another of the site’s leaks, concerning Carribean tax haven the Turks and Caicos islands, Assange praised the anti-corruption reporting of online-only, local news outlet the Turks and Caicos Journal, which he said was hounded out of several countries after law firms threatened its internet service providers (ISPs).

Warning of a new “privatised censorship”, he said that the Journal’s Googlemail account had been subpoened under US law and that Google agreed to surrender details of the news outlet’s account, at which point Wikileaks stepped in to provide a defence attorney.

He heavily criticised the search engine company for its behaviour in the TCI Journal case, and challenged the actions of ISPs in India, Japan and the US for allegedly agreeing to cut the Journal’s internet access rather than risk incurring legal costs. According to Assange, Googlemail is a completely insecure way of storing information. He claimed that the Guardian had recently transferred all of its internal email over to the Google service.

Alongside the TCI Journal there was praise reserved for Time magazine for publishing an extensive investigation into the Church of Scientology and defending its investigation at a cost of millions dollars, but with potential costs so high, Assange asked, “what are the incentives for publishers?” Wikileaks were themselves threatened with legal action by the Church after publishing secret documents relating to its “Operating Thetan Level” practices. The whistleblowing site responded by saying “in response to the attempted suppression, Wikileaks will release several thousand additional pages of Scientology material next week.”

Asked about Wikileaks’ funding, he said the site has so far raised $1 million dollars in donations but revealed it had had an application for a $650,000 grant rejected by the 2009 Knight News Foundation, despite being “the highest-rated applicant out of 3,000″, and heavily implied it was a politically-motivated decision.

Earlier this year, Wikileaks put forward a proposal in conjunction with Icelandic MPs to create a safe-haven for publishers – and their servers – in the country. Last month the proposal, known as the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), was passed by parliament and will change Icelandic law, aiming to increase the protection afforded journalists, sources and leakers.

Related posts:

IMMI 

Tragedies

Tragedies

The TCI Journal is my hero. I try to read the TCI Journal every day. Each daily exposure is for a West Indian what the cathartic effect must have been in old Athens of attending one of the tragedies of Sophocles. One leaves the pages of the Journal drained of all emotion, conscious only that it is good to be alive and living in a different place. I do not know how I could keep my sanity if I had to put up with what the people of the TCI are going through. They are my second set of heroes.

Just today, I was looking at the several items published on 4 June. I have to urge you to read them yourselves to see what I am talking about.

I started with a letter from W Hurd on Freedom of the Press. His quotations ably illustrated the points he was making. I was particularly struck by Adlai Stephenson’s “My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.”

John Hartley’s Letter from London reminded us how the political crisis now playing out in London may affect the liberties of the people of the TCI, and us in Anguilla too, for that matter.

Diana de Gara’s heart rending call for Patience took my breath away, as all her writing inevitably does.

And then I read Shawn Malcolm’s account of the proceedings in the Supreme Court yesterday. Some 15 lawyers from London were presenting applications by two of the foreigners who were mentioned by Sir Robin Auld as possibly being implicated in paying bribes to Premier Michael Missick. They are trying to stop the Auld Report from being published. They claim that Sir Robin’s remit from the Governor was only to investigate politicians. He had no business mentioning their clients’ names. As Mr Malcolm points out, it is difficult to see how Sir Robin could have detailed the reports of bribes paid to politicians if he did not mention who is alleged to have paid the bribes.

May they all burn in eternal hellfire.