Denormalize corruption, young mayor urges

While Pasig City Mayor Victor Sotto was grateful to the US government for recognizing him as an “anticorruption champion,” he said he expected the award to also help raise awareness on corruption.

“If we want better long-term governance, we need to fight corruption. We have to denormalize it, get it out of our culture,” Sotto said in a Twitter post.

The US Department of State on Tuesday conferred on the mayor the anticorruption champion title along with 11 other leaders across the globe for their “leadership, courage and impact in preventing, exposing and combating corruption.”

Sotto was the only Filipino leader who received the award.

Among Sotto’s efforts to promote transparency in government that was recognized by the agency was the passage of Pasig’s own version of the freedom of information bill in 2018, which provided a mechanism for the disclosure of the city’s public records.

Sotto, then a councilor, filed City Ordinance No. 2018-37, or the Pasig Transparency Mechanism Ordinance, which gave all citizens the right to access, examine, copy, publish and disseminate public records.

The ordinance also gave them the freedom to access the documents without having to state their reason.

According to the US Embassy, Sotto spent a month at Des Moines Public Information Board in the United States in 2018 through the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative professional fellows program.

“He used his experience to help him design and pass Pasig’s first freedom of information legislation when he returned to the Philippines. During his first year and a half in the mayor’s office, Sotto has continued efforts to guarantee the [residents] of Pasig easier access to city information, and committed to improve transparency in the city’s budgeting and contracting process,” it said in a statement.