Why we should join the Open Government Partnership

Active participation in OGP could help improve govt’s reputation so far as its integrity, responsiveness is concerned.

For any government to move forward towards a better democratic system, it must find scalable ways to work alongside stakeholders and ensure citizen participation in the policymaking process. The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is an international, multilateral initiative launched in 2011 to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency and empower citizens. The OGP is overseen by a committee of governments and civil society members, who aim at fighting corruption and harnessing technologies in order to influence the government.

Why is this such a key concept currently? In the aftermath of enormous progress in information and communication technologies, governments around the world are engaging in censorship and mass surveillance tactics. These initiatives are almost always hidden from the public, never to be disclosed — which, in turn, has divided the governance world into two distinctive factions: state governments engaging these technologies without any citizen participation in the process and civil society advocating privacy rights and citizens’ right to information.

As a result, both these groups, which ideally should work together for better policymaking, have created an air of animosity towards each other.

Pakistan has undergone a historic democratic transition of government, in the wake of which citizens are becoming more aware of their rights and more inclined to hold their leaders accountable. At this stage, it is all the more important for the country to become a member of an international platform such as the OGP, as a clear sign of Pakistan’s will to promote transparency, accountability, civil society collaboration and its fight against corruption.

In the past half year of this new government’s tenure, much has gone worse in terms of surveillance and censorship. YouTube not only remains blocked, but the government has made clear its preference for a localised website, which could allow sites to be blocked, as a condition for removing the block. Unfortunately, it has not made clear how this kind of blocking would be made accountable to due process. At the same time, numerous other websites remain blocked, with no indication of how such blocks could be lifted. In the past month, the online community saw an abrupt temporary ban on the movie database site, IMDb, which was followed by a selective blocking of a Balochi movie, The Line of Freedom. Again, there is no indication of a proper system of accountability for these apparently arbitrary acts of censorship.

It is imperative for the present government to open its surveillance and censorship processes and be accountable. Currently, the government uses vague terms like ‘pornography’, ‘blasphemy’ and ‘religious abuse’ to describe content that can be censored. Because of the vague definitions that the government has given of these terms, citizens have no way of telling what might be considered inappropriate or illegal. The internet has tremendous potential as a force for economic and social good, but not in such a climate of arbitrary and unpredictable internet governance.

The OGP is a community of 62 countries, where the government and civil society are working to implement reforms. Active participation in the OGP could help improve the government’s reputation insofar as its integrity and responsiveness are concerned. Conversely, if the government decides not to engage in the OGP community, Pakistani citizens will draw their own conclusions about their government’s attitude to transparency and citizen engagement.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 21^st, 2013.

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