Freedom of Information Act vital says press monitoring center
The Press Freedom Monitoring Center (CMWP) (http://www.freepress.org.pl) last month put together a draft law that it says will ensure access to information and transparency in public institutions.
In proposing the Freedom of Information Act, the CMWP hopes to put Poland on par with other European countries that have already passed similar legislation.
"This kind of law is incredibly important," said Andrzej Goszczynski, director of CMWP. "The Polish Constitution guarantees the right to information, however there is no legislation to guarantee that right."
CMWP is an independent non-governmental organization (NGO) whose mission is to protect and promote freedom of expression. It was founded in 1996 by the Polish Journalists Association.
For the past 18 months, the CMWP has been working on the draft with a coalition of NGOs and specialists. In June, CMWP plans to collect 100,000 signatures in support of the project, and then, as a civic initiative draft law, it will be submitted to Parliament.
The law would require public officials to provide citizens with full access to information about their activities, such as how they spend money or organize tenders. "We think that each person has the right to know what it is going on in his country, and there is no reason to deprive him of this knowledge," Goszczynski said.
CMWP's draft isn't the first of its kind in Poland. Last year, a similar proposal was prepared by the Adam Smith Research Center, an economic think tank. While the two organizations pursued their projects independently, they both said they would have been willing to cooperate on a joint draft law.
"They had a different concept than we did," Goszczynski said. According to Andrzej Sadowski of the Adam Smith Research Centre, it agreed to allow some politicians from Solidarity Election Action (AWS) submit the project to Parliament as their own. So far, the draft has been through one reading in the Sejm, but it's unclear when it will be considered again, according to Henryk Wujec, a Freedom Union (UW) MP and head of the Sejm committee. "It will be pushed through when we finish our work," he said.
That could take time, however. "(The Sejm committee) is doing its best not to push the draft through," Sadowski said.
Wujec disagreed. "The committee isn't slowing down its efforts," he said. "It has to hurry, but we have to make it a good law, not legal garbage as so many are."
The CMWP's Goszczynski was far less optimistic, saying that MPs have little or no interest in the draft law. "They're mainly thinking about the upcoming (autumn) elections now," Goszczynski said. "On the other hand, such a law is very difficult to push through because it would act as a bureaucratic leash."
According to Goszczynski, CMWP's project has more "prestige" than the Adam Smith initiative because it will be backed by average Poles rather than MPs.
"If the (Adam Smith Research Center's) project is not pushed through during the current term, it might as well be placed in a museum," Goszczynski added.
