Want to know how many bombs enriched with depleted uranium the US Defense Department bought last year with taxpayers’ money, and what companies they bought them from? It may require some time filing a request for the information and poring over records, but it is the right of every US citizen to demand, and be provided with, full disclosure about how public monies—federal or municipal—were spent. In Spain, it’s nobody’s business, and the Ministry of Defence will not even bother responding to such questions, even when they come from Spanish journalists.
“British journalists know, to the last penny, what it costs the treasury to pay for official cars, compensation to IRA suspects or the placement of cameras that measure the speed of cars,” wrote Rosario G. Gómez in an El País article on May 3rd, 2008. “In Spain, to learn about waiting lists at hospitals is a titanic task, and the salary of a news anchor on public television is a state secret. The difference between the United Kingdom and Spain is a law that regulates the right of access to information.”
Luxembourg, Cyprus, Greece and Spain are the only four Western European countries still without a law requiring any person, agency or business funded with public monies to make information about how that money is spent, and the results of those expenditures, available to its citizens. In Spain, that may be about to change. In a speech to the Inter-American Press Association on October 7th, 2008, Prime Minister José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero promised that public access legislation would be voted on by Congress during the current legislative session. But, his Socialist party had already promised such legislation during the 2004 election campaign and again in the 2008 race, and it has yet to appear.
A damning report about Spanish governmental secrecy was issued in October 2008 by Access Info Europe, a non-profit group lobbying for passage of public-access legislation. The organisation tracked 40 requests made in 2007 to Spanish governmental bodies for information. Only 23 percent of these were answered positively. Forty-two percent were denied and 35 percent of them simply went unanswered, meaning that three of every four requests failed to elicit the solicited information. These covered a wide range of topics including things as basic as how many foreigners were expelled from Spain in 2007. The Interior Ministry refused to provide those statistics, commenting: “It’s not advisable to provide individuals with this kind of information.”
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