Associate Press / D. Ian Hopper, AP Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- With protests and disruptions becoming a fixture of World Trade Organization meetings, two senators on Wednesday proposed establishing a "Global C-Span" to televise its proceedings and those of other international institutions.
In a report, the lawmakers said a new television network under the auspices of the multinational International Telecommunication Union could broadcast proceedings of the WTO, International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the International Olympic Committee.
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., a longtime expert on secrecy issues, said the WTO is becoming a "vitally important institution" as it decides critical health, employment and safety issues but too many of those decisions are made in private.
"More and more decisions affecting Americans after the Cold War will be made by international institutions," added Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. "There is no good reason why people should not have access to information about important decisions that affect their daily lives."
While European institutions have no tradition of openness, as opposed to the U.S. demands of public legislatures and open courts, Wyden said the U.S. financial stake in international bodies dictates that the nation should take a leading role in working to change their secretive nature.
"We could be listening at our desks to these important discussions through technology which is available right now," Wyden said. "There is exactly no excuse for dawdling here."
The U.S. Trade Representative's office also has announced that it is pushing for more openness at WTO meetings.
The senators also pointed a finger at the U.S. government with a Congressional Research Service study that in 1998, 1 in 10 of the 1,524 closed congressional meetings were done so without any statutory authority, in apparent defiance of so-called "sunshine" laws.
Wyden said that at the Federal Reserve Board, five meetings were closed without reason, and the Securities and Exchange Commission resisted the CRS's probe to find out why some meetings were held secretly.
"The record of our own agencies is not exactly stellar," Wyden said.
The senators want Congress to review its 28-year-old open-government act to discuss and eliminate some of its 10 exemptions, and to give the public more timely access to transcripts -- not redacted summaries -- of the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee, which can affect the stock market and interest rates.
Wyden is taking the government secrecy torch from Moynihan, who is retiring. It has been a tough battle for Moynihan, who said a government's inclination is to be secretive rather than actively try to hide something.
"It isn't so much a political decision as it's a bureaucratic one," he said.
International Telecommunication Union: http://www.itu.int World Trade Organization: http://www.wto.org International Monetary Fund: http://www.imf.org World Bank: http://www.worldbank.org:
