Right | Pakistan

ISLAMABAD: Twelve years after Khyber Pakhtunkhwa became Pakistan’s first province to enact a Right to Information (RTI) law, the Free and Fair Election Network (Fafen) notes the pioneering framework remains “underutilised and vulnerable to disinformation due to weak enforcement and structural gaps”. In a policy brief released Saturday titled “From Pioneer to Performer: Making Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Right to Information Act Work Against Disinformation”, Fafen urged the KP Assembly and provincial government to launch targeted legal and institutional reforms to transform KP’s pioneering right to information framework into an effective mechanism for proactive disclosure and public accountability. KP enacted the law after Article 19A on the “right to information” was added to the Constitution through the 18th Amendment in 2010. But Fafen’s assessment of 190 provincial public bodies’ websites found a stark implementation gap: on average, public bodies proactively disclosed only 57 per cent of the information the law ...