Members of the Coalition for the Freedom of Information Bill have kicked against a provision on the draft Freedom of Information Bill that requires some payments to be made.
The provision requires that people seeking information must be made to pay if searching for the information will take some considerable time.
“When you have a provision which says that for every hour of the search required in excess of two hours to locate information the fees would increase, it thereby places on the applicant the obligation to pay for the inefficiency of information management of the institution and we don’t think that that should be tolerated,” Mr. Akoto Ampaw of the coalition stated.
He argued that people should rather be made to pay for only the reproduction of the information.
Speaking on Joy FM’s Current Affairs Programme, The Front Page, Mr. Ampaw said “if you have an information officer in a particular agency whose work is to manage information and provide the information upon request and who is paid for that, the citizen when he goes to make the request should not be saddled with how long and how much effort it takes to retrieve the information.”
But Justice VCRAC Crabbe who supported the demand, explained that payment is meant to prevent a situation where people just come to do “fishing expedition”.
Listen to the attached audio for arguments
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