Election only the beginning says Fiji's CCF chief

Transcript

The CEO of Fiji's Citizens Constitutional Forum says the group has a lot of work ahead of it to empower people after the recent election.

Akuila Yabaki says CCF is hoping to carry on with its civic education programme on Fiji's transition to democracy which was stopped before the election amid an investigation by the country's anti-corruption agency.

The Reverend Yabaki told Sally Round the election two weeks ago is only the start of this transition.

AKUILA YABAKI: It's a starting point. It's like a car that has gone wrong and then needs to restart and I think it's important we do not interfere with the results immediately, that we should go through into democratic space and work in the next four years. We've been through eight years of military-backed rule, now we've got four years of democratic space. There'll still be issues about the elections but I don't think those are very important. I think the election should be seen as only the first step in Fiji's transition to democracy, but given the space that we have earned, it should be well-used, fully utilised to empower the people to participate in change and a lot of training needs to be done, because of what they call the "coup culture" and the severe censorship which has taken place, people are kind of debilitated in using their own power to be part of the change.

SALLY ROUND: Getting on to freedom of information, can you tell me about your plans to push through a bill on that which is something you'd were working on before 2006.

AY: Yes I think the freedom of information bill, or law was a prerequisite in the 1997 constitution but never implemented so I think you could also be critical of the SDL government at the time. You can be critical of the SDL government but at least they allowed us to have that discussion and we got as far as producing a draft bill which could be implemented in parliament. That was back in 2004 and we did get the support, working together with members of parliament, academics, professional journalists and civil society and we produced  a draft bill which was ready to go into parliament to be made into law in 2004, but then the coup took place in 2006, so we have it here ready and hopefully this could be one of the first things we do in the next parliament.

SR: And how important is it for such a bill to go through?

AY: It is important because in the 2013 government constitution, that's what we call it, there are comprehensive human rights provisions which are there, including on information, but it also has comprehensive claw-back clauses that they can be withdrawn, so this would be an interesting one to take forward. And I think the fact that we've been hindered by newspaper censorship, media censorship all these years, I think it would be a breath of fresh air to be able to take this through and then provide the framework for freedom of information into the future.