On The Accountability Of Government Information Disclosure In Public Emergencies

Public emergencies have characteristics of strong impact and mighty destructiveeffect, once in case public emergencies happens in one day, it will cause heavy loss toour economic and social development and bring out great threat to the safety ofcitizens’ lives and property. As we all know, government information disclosure is animportant part to cope public emergencies, while in the process of coping publicemergencies, government at all levels are difficult to avoid appearing phenomenon ofinformation disclosure untimely and insufficiency, and lastly cause the copingineffectively. Therefore, we should advance the accountability of governmentinformation disclosure in public emergencies. However, there still exists a great manyproblems in accountability work of government information disclosure, so finally howto guarantee citizens’ right to be informed, improve the ability of governmentemergency management, and build good image of honesty and transparentgovernment through strengthen the accountability of government informationdisclosure in public emergencies is of great significances. In present, these problemsare arousing wide public concern by various social circles.After the founding of New China, the developmental progression ofaccountability of government information disclosure in public emergencies could bedivided into following three periods, there are “political campaign” accountability inConfidentiality period from1949to1978,“case processing” accountability inSemi-overt period from1978to2003, and “institutionalization accountability” inopen period from2003to the present. Due to different historical periods, each periodhas its own characteristics about the accountability of government informationdisclosure. For the past few years, especially after the “SARS” event in2003, ourgovernment has made certain achievements in the accountability of governmentinformation disclosure, generally speaking, these achievements mainly including thedeepen of accountability theory, the constant introduction of accountabilityapproaches and the strengthen of accountability implementation. But there stillrevealed some problems, mainly performed as summarized as leak to ask, fail to ask,prejudiced to ask, heavy and light an inquiry. The reasons that caused these problemsare concerned with diverse aspects，such as imperfection of rules and regulations, lagof consciousness of responsibility and unsound of accountability system. From thecurrent demand of accountability of government information disclosure, in order to further perfect the accountability of government information disclosure, we should setthe sense of duty and strengthen investigating liabilities， establish scientificaccountability system in law, and intensify multiple variant accountabilitymechanisms, and last perfect diversified accountability cooperative system.