(SEAPA/IFEX) – Cambodian officials have been reconsidering the vitality of access to information to a free society, with influential personalities suggesting that too much accessible information could breed terrorism and pose a threat to state security. “Please check all the aspects of enlarging freedom of access to public information. Terrorists also need information,” Om Yentieng, […]
(SEAPA/IFEX) – Cambodian officials have been reconsidering the vitality of access to information to a free society, with influential personalities suggesting that too much accessible information could breed terrorism and pose a threat to state security.
“Please check all the aspects of enlarging freedom of access to public information. Terrorists also need information,” Om Yentieng, an advisor to Prime Minister Hun Sen, told a gathering of government officials and representatives of local and international aid and development organisations in Phnom Penh on 6 June 2005.
His remark, quoted by the English-language newspaper “Cambodia Daily” in its 7 June edition, would seem to undermine the government’s promise to pass a law on access to information. That promise was made at a donors’ meeting for Cambodia in 2004. Under pressure from donor countries that had become impatient with the level of corruption in Cambodia, the government also pledged to pass a long-delayed anti-corruption law in late 2005, before adopting a freedom of information act in 2006.
On 6 June, Om Yentieng said public access to information could undermine national security, infringe on individual privacy and violate the internal workings of private companies.
While Om Yentieng’s opinions are not necessarily official policy, the sentiments of the influential advisor nonetheless bode ill for an already vulnerable 1995 Press Law.
