Chasing after information to trace the
legislative journey of the child rights bill has not been easy. Spending
endless hours, online and on the phone, just to unearth the changes that have
been made to the bill (throughout the different stages of the legislative
process) is a reminder that both Parliament and the government have a serious
communication problem that needs tackling.
اضافة اعلان
For the past few
months, understanding the reasons behind the bill’s metamorphosis from a great
piece of legislation to a second-rate law that left out some of the best
articles included in its first version meant going down the rabbit hole of
information.
The bill’s first
draft (for the year 2020) was authored by a technical committee comprising 14
institutions, including the National Council for Family Affairs; the ministries
of education, health and justice; the Public Security Directorate; UNICEF; the
Jordan River Foundation, and the National Center for Human Rights.
But their version,
which was well-written and to a great extent catering to the best interests of
children, was not the one presented to Parliament by the Cabinet.
The first obstacle
to information gathering came from the Legislation and Opinion Bureau’s
website, which posted the 2020 version of the bill, but not the updated 2022
copy that the Cabinet had truncated and approved before referring it to the
Lower House. Finding the Cabinet’s version of the child rights bill took a long
time and multiple phone calls before a local reporter graciously sent it over.
Then came other
failed attempts to find the final amendments adopted recently by a joint
parliamentary committee tasked with “fixing” the bill, in light of a fierce
misinformation and disinformation campaign that claimed the draft law was
entertaining destructive articles that, incidentally, were not even part of it
(such as allowing children to change their religion).
News reports were
unclear on whether the joint committee, comprising 22 MPs from the “legal” and
the “women and family affairs” committees, has taken on board the Iftaa’
Council’s recommendation to substitute the term “parents” with “the legal
guardian” in Article 15 of the bill, prompting women rights activists to
describe the proposal as a patriarchal attempt to give women and mothers the
backseat in the hierarchy of the nuclear family.
On Monday,
Parliament passed the bill after striking out at least one article previously
approved (and probably drafted) by the joint parliamentary committee.
Seeing how recent
news reports have left many questions unanswered in this regard, I made another
phone call to ask a communications officer working for an institution with
access to the Lower House to share the MPs’ amendments before they got
presented to the Senate.
At that precise
moment, though, it became clear that Jordan has a massive communication problem
that prevents Jordanians from accessing the walled mazes of public information.
No wonder disinformation was rampant on social media; facts were not easily available
to counter the rumor mill.
For the country’s future “program-based” political parties to succeed, information is the bedrock on which everything else will be built, because socio-political attitudes and election campaigns cannot be created without a foundation of facts.
Ironically, recent
governmental messaging has been about increasing the participation of women and
youth in political life. But to achieve this, these information roadblocks need
to be removed.
Looking back at two months of information chasing,
it is highly doubtful that European citizens had to jump through similar hoops
to get basic data about their parliaments’ deliberations. Information-sharing
is a basic piece of the political puzzle; how come it keeps on eluding us here
in Jordan?
Our Parliament has
countless Memorandum of understanding's with peer parliaments all over the world to exchange experience
and improve its professional conduct, yet its two main official websites do not
have a basic information center detailing the journey of each bill as it moves
through the corridors of the Lower House and Senate.
Even the simplest
of information is presented in a convoluted manner. At the moment, the House of
Representative’s site is hard to navigate and uses an old theme with obsolete
features. For example, users have to click on 10 numbered links to get the full
list of Parliament’s 130 MPs, where it should be a single scrollable page
containing all the names.
That is why
legislative reformists and political theorists must face up to the fact that
without easily accessible and well-structured information, Jordan will go
nowhere in its stab at political reform.
Access to
information is where it all starts. For the country’s future “program-based”
political parties to succeed, information is the bedrock on which everything
else will be built, because socio-political attitudes and election campaigns
cannot be created without a foundation of facts.
The “political
programs” Jordan wants its newly-formed political parties to come up with
hinges on information. It is not enough to pass a progressive law that protects
political parties from legal prosecution; information, too, has to be easily
obtainable and essentially user-friendly.
Without basic
facts, laid out by experienced communications professionals working for all
three branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial), political
parties will end up resorting to propaganda and conspiracy theories to gain
public support. The political spin-doctoring and populist grandstanding that
has targeted the child rights bill in recent months is a case in point.
For that reason,
Jordan’s information sector, in its entirety, is in need of a complete
overhaul. Keeping citizens in the dark will only push them to conspiracy
theories and hearsay to understand the world they live in.
It will be hard to
achieve real reform, political or otherwise, if information remains obscure and
difficult to obtain. Now is the time to introduce a new informational
infrastructure that enables future politicians and their electors to form
attitudes and opinions based on solid facts.
Ruba Saqr has reported on the environment, worked in the
public sector as a communications officer, and served as managing editor of a
business magazine, spokesperson for a humanitarian INGO, and as head of a PR
agency.
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