Democratic quality is measured in transparency. If a State, as Joseph Kafka was able to see, is an impenetrable tangle, a democratic State barely preserves tiny corners where light and clean air do not make their way. And in those terms, Spain smells like the unventilated room of a friendless teenager.
This week, the Civio Foundation received the King of Spain award from the Efe agency for its commitment to transparency. The organization told them that they could thank the award on the spot, but hours before the award ceremony they changed their minds, so they had to publish the planned speech on their website, which questioned pro-transparency initiatives such as the reform of the regulations of the Casa del Rey , for being “cosmetics”.
Here we are. But this deficit is not only projected in the present, in the improvable transparency practices of public administrations, but also substantially in the past, over which the impenetrable veil of the Franco regime’s Law of Official Secrets survives, which only underwent a slight update. in October 1978, consisting of enabling the Courts to hear secret matters. Of some. Sometimes.
The matter has come back to the present with the Pegasus espionage scandal, because it points directly to the CNI, an organization that operates by law under the veil of secrecy and that, instead of having been limiting its powers and restricting the prohibited material, or having been disaggregated into various intelligence agencies – most democracies have segregated domestic and foreign intelligence into various agencies to avoid concentrating in a single agency all the dark power that operating covertly grants – it has only grown in areas of operation and subjects. The latest conquest, the Telecommunications Law, which makes it a supervisor with the capacity to inspect and sanction the entire network and systems of any state or regional public administration, as PNV deputy Mikel Legarda warned from the congressional rostrum in the plenary session on April 28.
President Pedro Sánchez, on May 27, in addition to accepting greater judicial supervision of the CNI’s activity, proposed by the PNV and assumed by the Executive, announced that he would streamline the comprehensive bill on Official Government Secrets, whose general lines they are unknown, beyond the will, government sources point out, to standardize it to “the best European standards”, to overcome the current regulation, “totally obsolete”. More than obsolete, the Spanish regulation is simply not democratic in nature.
In any case, there has been a noticeable change of orientation, since the Ministry of Defense, to which the CNI reports, was supposed to work on this bill – and in fact, some sources indicated half a year ago that the project prepared by the team of Margarita Robles was very advanced, but right now the direction of this regulation has passed into the hands of the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños. A shift in the protection of this relevant law, considering the divergent strategy of both ministers in managing the Pegasus scandal, whose real dimensions remain unknown, precisely because the CNI law classifies everything that the National Intelligence Center does as secret.
While the Executive weaves its project, it keeps the PNV project embalmed in Congress through the usual filibustering of extending sine die the period of amendments – soon there will be a hundred extensions, since it was presented just two years ago. The Basque group had already presented it in November 2016. The initiative is a concise but perceptive reform project of the 1968 law that, by only modifying four articles, turns it into a law of terms similar to that of other democracies: it establishes the declassification of secret matters at 25 years and reserved matters at 10 years, with the possibility for both of the executive approving a 10-year extension. But what was relevant –and what scared the PP and PSOE the most– was the transitory provision that established that, upon the entry into force of the law, all the material that had met those deadlines would be declassified. In other words –we were in 2016–, to 1991.
The PP, at the time in government, presented some amendments that in themselves were a new law –with more reserved categories–, and the PSOE limited itself to extending the optional term –from 10 to 25 years– and, above all, to modify the transitory provision through a moratorium that in practice prevented the declassification of any new material until practically 2030. Despite the insistence of the PNV, there was never a presentation, and the project declined with the end of the legislature.
Until today, the attitude of bipartisanship with the closed cabinets of the genesis of democracy – all that happened between 1975 and 1990, including a coup d’état – can be summed up in four words: “This is not the time”.
The question, of course, is whether this time we are going to ventilate the room or spray the miasma again with a flowery air freshener.
