Access Info has today published on its website the minutes of Spain’s weekly Cabinet meetings for the years 1996 to 2017, making them available to the public for the first time in Spanish democratic history.
The minutes, which contain the desicions reached in each weekly meeting, were obtained using information requests by Access Info as part of collaborative research with journalist Jesús Escudero, and have been published to mark the third anniversary of the entry into force of Spain’s Transparency Law on 10 December 2014.
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Access Info's work to open up the Spanish Cabinet started in 2016 with an initial request for the agendas of the weekly Cabinet meetings, documents which were then used by various journalists as the basis for further investigations.
Access Info is calling for information on decision-making processes to be made public: “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” concluded Gutiérrez, “The government should now ensure proactive publication of the minutes not only of Cabinet meetings but also those of other decision-making processes.”
While New Zealand (falsely) prides itself on our government transparency, this information would never be released here. DPMC has rejected requests for basic information such as Cabinet agendas, claiming that telling us what ministers are discussing or have discussed in the past this would compromise Ministerial collective responsibility, free and frank advice, and confidentiality. They have refused to release older agendas where those interests are less likely to be relevant, and refused even to release information with redactions to protect those interests (standard practice with every other agency). Their justification for this is that
Cabinet agendas have been requested under the OIA in the past, but the Cabinet Office has never released them publicly because my predecessors and I have maintained a consistent position that it would not be in the public interest to do so.
In other words, it is secret because it has always been secret, and bugger the law! (Incidentally, the public servant who wrote that is now the SIS head who is obstructing IGIS investigations. Mindless secrecy seems to be her thing).
Cabinet is the heart of our government. Secrecy there poisons everything else. Transparency there, around what they are discussing and what they have decided, is vital if we are to consider ourselves to be an open democracy. The new government has made some positive noises around proactive release of Cabinet material, which is good, but until that happens, the least they could do is force DPMC to comply with the OIA and release such information on request. Otherwise, we face the prospect of being less transparent than fascist Spain.