Madrid, 4 October 2013 – With Spain’s future transparency law open for amendments in the Senate until 8 October, Access Info has launched a last campaign for improvements. The goal is to strengthen the law’s score of 68 out of 150 on the RTI Rating, and a future position number 75 out of 96 laws globally.
Twitter campaign: Together with a group of Spanish transparency organisations, Access Info has launched a Twitter campaign aimed at Senators, which has already resulted in meetings with various political groupings in the Senate.
Petition on Change.org: Today the CSOs launched a Change.org petition calling on Senate to improve the law. Although this is unlikely (of 4000 amendments proposed in the Senate in the current legislature, just 14 have been included in the final versions of the laws), it is important to have tried everything to improve the law.
Letter to Diplomatic Community: Access Info today wrote to the main embassies in Madrid (see a sample letter in PDF) alerting them to the concerns about the law, in particular that it will not serve to reduce corruption or improve participation.
OSCE warns against reducing transparency: the OSCE’s Representative for Freedom of the Media in 13 September statement warned that if adopted as it currently stands, the future law will “restrict access to information in Spain” (see here http://www.osce.org/fom/104897).
In Spain’s Open Government Partnership action plan it pledged to introduce a Transparency Act with “far-reaching transparency obligations” which “fully implements the right to access to information held by public authorities”. The Government has also said it will sign and ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Access to Official Documents.
“Spain is on the verge of betraying these promises to the public and the commitment in the OGP action plan,” said Helen Darbishire, Executive Director of Access Info.
Darbishire added that “After seven years of campaigning for an access to information law in Spain, it would be so disappointing to see a sub-standard and ineffective law adopted. There is little time left, but it’s still not to late to bring the law into line with international standards.”
For more information, contact:
Victoria@access-info.org | +34 91 365 65 58