The success or failure of a right to information regime is heavily dependent on the public officials who are tasked with implementation, and whether they are informed about their transparency obligations. Yesterday, as part of a wider project to support implementation of the Indonesian Law on Public Information Openness, the Centre for Law and Democracy (CLD) and the Indonesian Center for Environmental Law (ICEL) carried out a training for public officials in the Indonesian province of Banten. The training was attended by information officers (PPIDs) from over 40 different public bodies from across the province, as well as representatives from the Banten and Jakarta Information Commissions.
“Given the centrality of information officers to proper implementation of Indonesia’s right to informtion law, we are pleased so many of them were able to attend the training.” said Toby Mendel, Executive Director of CLD. “We hope that this training and others for officials we have done under this project will improve implementation of the law.”
The training is one of a number of interventions being carried out under this project. The programme also includes supply-side interventions, grassroots awareness-raising activities and the production of resource materials.
“Over the past year, there have been 427 complaints regarding information disclosure in Banten,” said Dessy Eko Prayitno, Researcher with ICEL. “By building capacity among the PPIDs, we hope to lower this number, and to enable Banten to become a leader in implementation of the RTI law”.
More information on the programme, as well as versions of the training manual in both English and Bahasa Indonesia and other resources, are available at: http://www.law-democracy.org/live/projects/rti-in-indonesia/.
For further information, please contact:
Michael Karanicolas
Legal Officer
Centre for Law and Democracy
info@law-democracy.org
+1 902 431-3688
www.law-democracy.org
