Before he became president, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. expressed support for the passage of a Freedom of Information (FOI) bill, a law seen to help improve citizen participation but has been in legislative limbo for three decades.
“An FOI law would have allowed active public participation in stamping out corruption in government through easy disclosure of state action,” Marcos said as senator in March 2016.
But Marcos as president now made no mention of FOI or any acknowledgment of protecting citizens’ right to information in his inaugural speech today or even during his campaign.
This is a departure from his predecessors, who sought to prioritize information access initiatives despite criticisms about their implementation.
The late President Benigno “Noynoy” C. Aquino III committed to pass an FOI law as early as 2010 in his campaign, but that fell on deaf ears in both the 15th and 16th Congress. Instead, the executive branch during the Aquino administration made more budget information available, mandated agencies to automatically upload records on their websites under the Transparency Seal, and pursued open data, among others.
Among former President Rodrigo Duterte’s first set of executive orders meanwhile included Executive Order No. 2 (series of 2016), which provided for guidelines in accessing records from executive agencies. This order prompted the creation of the FOI portal.
The big elephant in the room now too is whether we will get to see a copy of Marcos’ Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN) as president.
The last of Duterte’s publicly available SALN was released in 2018. The Office of the Ombudsman restricted access to asset records and has not released them since. The central office of the Office of the Ombudsman is the custodian of the SALN of presidents, vice presidents, and constitutional officials.
In January 2022, Marcos declined making his SALNs public as he claimed that it could be weaponized for political attacks. Later that month, in February, he said he was willing to release his asset record but emphasized that it is still the custodian’s discretion to do so. END