There is a certain irony in the way the Prime Minister responded to the outgoing Ombudsman’s call for a Freedom of Information Act last week.

Joe Sammut – whose term of office officially expired last Wednesday, but which has been extended to 1 October at the invitation of the President – claimed in his final communiqué that government had so far not acted upon his repeated calls for a legal framework to regulate the release of official information.

In a swift and emphatic reply, Dr Gonzi claimed that this was not the case; that in fact, he had already requested the Principal Permanent Secretary to investigate the viability of such an act. Significantly, the Prime Minister claimed that he had done so before the Ombudsman had actually made his request.

Hence the irony: it seems that, having requested a study into the possibility of a “Freedom of Information Act”, the Prime Minister then unaccountably omitted to inform the public about it.

Matters become stranger still in the light of Mr Sammut’s subsequent letter, published last Sunday in Maltatoday, in which he pointed out that his original request had been made as long ago as 1997… in other words, seven whole years before Dr Gonzi took office as Prime Minister in the first place.

But, leaving aside these and other discrepancies, the very fact that the Prime Minister has now requested the Principal Permanent Secretary to look into the possibility of a Freedom of Information Act is itself a very welcome initiative. It is also somewhat surprising, when you consider that the same government has been (and still is) so remarkably reticent when it comes to releasing to the public any form of information of its own accord.

One or two examples should suffice. Last week, this newspaper dispatched a number of questions to the Office of the Prime Minister on the subject of Electoral Reform. The questions, together with the official reply, are published on page 9. In all honesty, the reply appears somewhat incongruous in the context of a free, democratic and above all European country. For one thing, it is hard to say exactly which discussions the government is trying to safeguard with its silence. After all, the original tripartite discussions had been aborted several weeks earlier. Are we to understand, then, that there are other, “secret” and apparently “bipartite” discussions going on? If so, whose interests would be jeopardised by revealing details of these discussions at this stage? The national interest… or the individual interests of the two parties concerned?

Besides, the official reply from Office of the Prime Minister appears to directly contradict the Prime Minister’s previous statement regarding freedom of information. For how can you have a government which, on the one hand, claims to be considering the introduction of a Freedom of Introduction Act, while on the other, refusing to voluntarily release information… as a matter of policy?

However, the seriousness of the issue raised by the Ombudsman becomes doubly apparent when it comes to issues of human rights. On 19 June of this year, the GWU’s Sunday newspaper it-Torca published a disquieting story under the headline “Malta found guilty of torture”. The article quoted from a report prepared by the Council of Europe’s Commission for the Prevention of Torture, and which had apparently been submitted to the Home Affairs Ministry.

Needless to add, it-Torca’s story was peremptorily rebutted by the Ministry, which issued an immediate counter-statement asserting that the Council of Europe’s report came to no such conclusions at all, adding that the full report would be made public in due course.

Well over a month has now elapsed since the allegation first appeared, and despite its initial outburst, the Ministry has to date persisted in not publishing the report. This is in itself surprising, considering that the same original counter-statement had argued that, contrary to it-Torca’s story, the report in question was actually very favourable in Malta’s regard.

How disappointing, then, that most of the local media were content to limit their coverage of this issue to simply publishing the official rebuttal, without asking even the most basic of questions. That is, if this report was so favourable… then what, exactly, is keeping the government from publishing it?

This week, The Malta Independent on Sunday formally requested a copy of the Council of Europe’s report, in order to assess the situation based on first-hand documentation. As in other cases where the requested information is potentially embarrassing to the government, our request has so far not been met. Instead, the official reply merely outlined that the government “has no legal obligation to publish such reports”.

It must be said that, coming from a government which claims to be studying the viability of a Freedom of Information Act, this attitude is not very encouraging. In fact, one can only wonder why the supposedly “free press” has tolerated for so long a situation whereby the flow of information appears to be tightly and exclusively controlled by a handful of individuals, all of whom are comfortably ensconced in government positions. At times, these officials give the impression that their primary allegiance is to the political party which happens to occupy government benches at the time… if not directly to the Minister himself. This is rather unwholesome, when you consider that, as public officials, their primary allegiance should always be to the general public… which, among other things, pays for their salaries through its taxes.

However, the real issue is one of transparency. It is hardly acceptable that in an EU member State, sensitive information continues to be monopolised for all the world as though it were the private property of the party in government. For these and other reasons, this newspaper deems the introduction of a Freedom of Information Act, as recommended by the Ombudsman, to be a matter of high priority for the nation.