By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BATAM, Indonesia, Sep 17 2006 (IPS)

Civil society organisations gathered on this island, ahead of the annual meeting of the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in neighbouring Singapore, have launched a ‘global charter’ demanding transparency from the finance institutions.

This initiative, which argues that the public’s right to information has greater weight than the WB-IMF’s willingness to be transparent, marks a new direction that non governmental organisations (NGOs) are taking from their usual mission – targeting governments that deny the right to freedom of opinion and information to their citizens.

‘’Taking on the Bank and other international financial institutions is our new rallying cry. We have expanded our mission,” Toby Mandel, law programme director at ‘Article 19′, the international media rights watchdog, told IPS in an interview shortly after the launch on Sunday. ”The charter aims to pry open the highly secretive practices of the WB-IMF. These public bodies must be as open as the governments they are calling upon to be transparent.”

Countries such as India, Mexico and South Africa have a better structure of openness and have national laws concerning the right to information that make it easier for citizens to secure documents than at the Bank, he added. ‘’We should get information not when they (WB-IMF) want to release it, but when we, the people, want it.”

‘’The right to access information held by public bodies is a fundamental human right,” states the ‘Transparency Charter for International Financial Institutions: Claiming our Right to Know’ in its preamble. ‘’A two-way flow of information provides a foundation for healthy policy development, decision-making and project delivery.”

The charter has set out nine principles to compel the financial powerhouses to fall in line with the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees the right to ‘’seek, receive and impart information and ideas”. Among them are the public’s right to access information held by the IFIs, ‘’regardless of who produced the document and whether the information relates to a public or private actor”.

And to strengthen the public stake in this issue, the sixth principle calls for the creation of an ‘’independent and authoritative body” to review requests for information that the IFIs deny. ‘’Anyone who believes that an international financial institution has failed to respect its access to information policy, including through a refusal to provide information in response to a request, has the right to have the matter reviewed.”

The charter is the work of the Global Transparency Initiative, a coalition of eight freedom-of-information (FoI) groups, including Article 19, the Washington D.C-based Bank Information Centre (BIC), the Manila-based Access to Information Network, the London-based Brettons Woods Project and the Cape Town-based Institute for Democracy in South Africa. It comes two years after the FoI groups rallied under this new banner to bring the financial institutions under their critical gaze.

The launch of this charter also marks a vote of no confidence in the Bank’s existing ‘’disclosure policy”, which was initiated in 1994 to make some of its records accessible to people. ‘’Compared to 15 years ago, the Bank is disclosing more information now. But there is no right for the people to demand the Bank to disclose the information they need,” said Jennifer Kalafut, of BIC, at the launch of the charter.

‘’Do they disclose reports and performance audits? No,” she revealed. ‘’Are the board of directors open about the decisions that are made? No.”

‘’The World Bank should change to accept transparency as a right,” she added. ‘’The problem is that they are stuck with a paradigm that they are the ones to choose what information must be released.”

Activists and researchers meeting here for the three-day International People’s Forum (IPF) are throwing their weight behind the charter. Those that IPS spoke with welcomed this initiative as part of an on-going global drive to force WB-IMF to be more open and transparent at a time when these institutions are demanding that national government address corruption and ensure transparent functioning.

‘’This (charter) will help us audit any World Bank and ADB (Asian Development Bank) projects in Bangladesh,” said Reza Chowdhury, secretary of Campaign for Good Governance, a network of 700 grass roots groups, based in Dhaka. ‘’This also exposes the Bank, which is currently pushing a new programme to fight corruption. If it does not recognise the public’s right to information of its records, it will be difficult for the Bank to lecture to governments.”

According to Stephen Mandel, senior researcher at the New Economics Foundation, a London-based think tank, ‘’the Bank refuses to reveal how decisions are made and the voting records of the board of directors, which is useful in holding the executive directors in each country accountable”.

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