Avoiding transparency

IN January this year, the National Assembly passed a private member’s bill to amend Section 138 of the Elections Act, 2017, which may blunt, if not totally reverse, the legal requirement of making public the submitted annual statements of assets and liabilities by national and provincial legislators by the Election Commission of Pakistan. The amendment would create an exception allowing the presiding officer of a legislature to ask the ECP to keep a member’s statements confidential if the presiding officer determines that publication would pose a serious threat to the member’s life or safety. The bill was forwarded to the Senate but, fortunately, has not yet been passed. Earlier, the ECP was pressured into discontinuing the practice of posting the Gazette Notification of legislators’ statements of assets and liabilities on its website, and people were constrained to purchase a hard copy of the Gazette Notification through a complicated and time-consuming procedure, diluting the intended transparency guaranteed by the law. This is not the first attempt to undermine laws requiring transparent information about elected public officials or about those aspiring to public office. The Elections Act, 2017, was a landmark piece of legislation that included several electoral reforms but, unfortunately, did away with the legal requirement for each candidate for public office to submit some 19 declarations under oath along with nomination papers. The declarations provided and made public information such as candidates’ assets, liabilities, educational qualifications, tax paid, and records of registered criminal cases, if any, against the candidate, along with similar data, to help voters make an informed choice. After civil society reacted to this blatant reversal of transparency, the Lahore High Court, and later the Supreme Court, stepped in. In its June 6, 2018, judgment, the Supreme Court chief justice restored the requirement of public affidavits after journalists filed a public interest petition. Making the assets and liabilities of senior civil servants public has been a contentious issue in Pakistan for a long time. Advocates of transparency argue that public disclosure is vital to combat corruption and track illicit enrichment. Civil servants and certain state institutions often give counterarguments that making their monetary worth public compromises their personal privacy and puts their families at risk of extortion, kidnapping, and targeted harassment. They argue that the media can take asset declarations out of context, leading to unfair public scrutiny or ‘media trials’ before any wrongdoing is proven. There is a trend of undermining processes meant to ensure transparency in public bodies. Senior civil servants also view external demands for transparency as an infringement on their institutional independence or an attempt to weaken their administrative authority. These arguments and counter-arguments are not confined to Pakistan; they are part of a global debate, but it is more pronounced in developing countries like ours. Both sides’ positions may carry weight, but the balance recently tilted in favour of transparency when the IMF put its foot down and demanded that the government ensure senior civil servants’ assets are made public. The Fund’s Governance and Corruption Diagnostic Assessment, made public last November, included 15 priority recommendations for the government. One of them requires the FBR, the Establishment Division, and NAB to strengthen accountability and integrity among high-level federal civil servants by initiating the publication of asset declarations in 2026 and introducing risk-based verification of asset declarations within six months. Ironically, an international agency had to impose this transparency; we ourselves failed to introduce the practice as a voluntary measure of good governance. There is a trend of undermining processes meant to ensure transparency in public bodies. Pakistan has enacted the Transparency and Right to Information (RTI) laws both at the federal and provincial levels. In addition, independent information commissions have been established in Islamabad and the four provincial capitals to adjudicate complaints regarding the denial of information under the Act. Despite this elaborate transparency infrastructure, requests for information have suffered setbacks in some celebrated cases. An Islamabad-based journalist, Rana Abrar Khalid, had submitted an information request to the Cabinet Division in November 2020 seeking details of gifts received, retained and deposited in the toshakhana by then prime minister Imran Khan. The request was denied. The journalist filed a complaint with the Pakistan Information Commission, which upheld the request’s legitimacy and directed the government to provide the information. Instead, the federal government filed a petition with the Islamabad High Court, which dismissed it. The government was planning to approach the Supreme Court when the Imran Khan government was removed through a vote of no-confidence. A request for information about staff strength, vacancies, temporary employees, new positions, gender diversity in the workforce, and the latest approved Service Rules of the Supreme Court, filed under the RTI law in 2019, was declared unmaintainable. Still, the chief justice ‘magnanimously’ asked the registrar to provide the information. Sadly, it set a precedent that superior courts are not covered by RTI laws, although the laws do not explicitly exempt superior courts. In April 2026, citing the Supreme Court precedent, the Lahore High Court refused to disclose its policy on judicial privileges and details of the official vehicles used by judges, even though the Punjab Information Commission had upheld the request. The Commission, however, withdrew its direction to the Lahore High Court to provide the information after the court’s judgement. Transparency is an important ingredient of good governance, and any backsliding on this count will further weaken the quality of governance. Pakistan should review, and reverse, the recent trend of diluting transparency. The writer is the president of Pakistan-based think tank Pildat. [email protected] X: @ABMPildat Published in Dawn, October 3rd, 2026