NEWS | Wednesday, 03 December 2008

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PM retains power to keep Cabinet papers secret

The Prime Minister will retain the power to keep Cabinet papers that are 30 years or older secret, if he so wishes, in a new amendment to the proposed Freedom of Information Act.
The original bill, headed for approval in parliament, did not contain any form of disclosure obligations on government, keeping Cabinet papers and working documents secret from the public eye.
Now a new amendment will give the prime minister the power to choose which documents can be made available every year, from Cabinet papers that are 30 years or older.
Clause 29 of the law exempts any document which discloses “any deliberation or decision of the Cabinet, other than a document by which a decision of the Cabinet was published.”
A new clause however gives the Prime Minister the prerogative to “direct that certain Cabinet documents, being documents selected from among those that are 30 years old or more, shall be subject to disclosure, whereupon this subarticle shall not apply to such documents.”
The clause does not bind the Prime Minister to make such documents available, leaving it up to the government of the day to choose whether to make any Cabinet papers available, and even select which to make public.
The new law is expected to go for its Third Reading in parliament very shortly, but the Opposition has raised questions about the direction the law has taken, namely with the office of the Data Protection Commissioner and that of the Information Commissioner being fused; a clause prohibiting anyone who hasn’t been resident in Malta for more than five years to apply for a request under the law; and a wide net of exempted documents.

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