![\"Ley_de_transparencia\"](\"http:\/\/www.access-info.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/Ley_de_transparencia.jpg\")
<\/h1>\n<\/h1>\nMadrid 29 May 2012 \u2014 <\/em>The Spanish Government has made minimal changes to its proposed access to information law has ignored the changes proposed by national experts and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).<\/p>\n The new text, published quietly on the Presidency website without informing members of the Coalici\u00f3n Pro Acceso or the public in general, appears to have ignored suggestions for improvement made during the public consultation two months ago, which received almost 3,700 contributions, although this cannot be stated with certainty given that the government has refused, to date, to make those comments public in spite of claiming that the consultation was \u201can act of transparency in itself.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The new text has failed to make fundamental changes recommended by national experts during meetings of the Commission of Experts convened to discuss the law where leading legal specialists warned that the law falls below international standards. These concerns include that:<\/p>\n \u00bb\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The law does not recognise a fundamental right of access to information in line with the protection of freedom of expression in the Spanish constitution;<\/p>\n \u00bb\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The law only applies to administrative information and does not apply to the judicial and legislative branches;<\/p>\n \u00bb\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The definition of information includes various exceptions, something which is clearly out of line with the Council of Europe Convention on Access to Official Documents;<\/p>\n \u00bb\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The law contains exceptions and blanket exclusions of information which cannot even be requested (opinions summaries, internal reports and communications between administrative bodies), again out of line with international standards.<\/p>\n Spain\u2019s Vice President stated a week ago that the government had included in the law any comments \u201cwhich fit with the philosophy of the law\u201d but given the minimal changes this raises the question as to whether the philosophy behind this transparency law is consistent with international and comparative standards on the right of access to information.<\/p>\n \u201cWith this law it will be impossible to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Access to Official Documents. It is hard to understand how Spain can propose a law which flies in the face of even the minimum international standards<\/em>,\u201d said Helen Darbishire, Executive Director of Access Info Europe.<\/p>\n \u201cThe refusal to recognise a right of access to information means that Spain is ignoring its international human rights treaty obligations, and the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and the interpretation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights by the UN Human Rights Committee,\u201d<\/em> added Darbishire<\/p>\n The minimal changes made to the text include adding a public interest test to some, but not all, the exceptions and introducing sanctions for failing to respond to information requests within the specified time limit.<\/p>\n Another change is from the exclusion of \u201creports\u201d to exclusion of \u201cinternal reports\u201d, a change which does not seem to make much sense given that the law does not contain a definition of internal reports; the law retains a series of exclusions which prevent a requester even asking for information that may have been used as the basis of a decision making process.<\/p>\n A further significant problem which has been criticised by members of the Commission of Experts is the lack of independence of the future Transparency Agency charged with overseeing compliance with the law.<\/p>\n Access Info Europe notes that in its Open Government Partnership Action Plan, Spain promised to reform the law following the public consultation \u201cto ensure that the final version of our Transparency Act responds to the issues that are of most concern to our citizens.\u201d There is no evidence to date that this has been done and Access Info Europe today reiterated its call for the submissions to the consultation to be made public. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Madrid 29 May 2012 \u2014 The Spanish Government has made minimal changes to its proposed access to information law has ignored the changes proposed by national experts and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The new text, published quietly on the Presidency website without informing members of the Coalici\u00f3n Pro Acceso or the public in general, appears to have ignored suggestions for improvement made during the public consultation two months ago, which received almost 3,700 contributions, although this cannot be stated with certainty given that the government has refused, to date, to make those comments public in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":11631,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[126],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-esp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11632"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17838,"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11632\/revisions\/17838"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}