Partners and allies reproach the PSOE for keeping the veil over the transition

Everyone took it for granted that the PSOE would try to ensure that the first law of Official Secrets of democracy did not involve the declassification of the materials of the transition –including the coup d'état of February 23, 1981 and the dirty war against ETA– but nobody , neither their partners nor their parliamentary allies, expected that the Socialists would dare to set the longest deadline for declassification of secret material of Western democracies, 50 years, extendable, in a geopolitical framework – Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, the United Kingdom United States United States.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
01 August 2022 Monday 18:50
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Partners and allies reproach the PSOE for keeping the veil over the transition

Everyone took it for granted that the PSOE would try to ensure that the first law of Official Secrets of democracy did not involve the declassification of the materials of the transition –including the coup d'état of February 23, 1981 and the dirty war against ETA– but nobody , neither their partners nor their parliamentary allies, expected that the Socialists would dare to set the longest deadline for declassification of secret material of Western democracies, 50 years, extendable, in a geopolitical framework – Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, the United Kingdom United States United States...– in which the standard is between 25 and 30 years, with some subjects with longer terms (up to 50 in France and 75 in the United States) or subject to extension. No other country in the area has these starting deadlines, and not even NATO – which only establishes 50 years for material related to nuclear safety – requires its members to comply with such deadlines.

There is a certain stupefaction and this is how everyone spoke yesterday, both United We Can, which hopes to convince the socialists to set deadlines comparable to modern democracies before the draft returns to the Council of Ministers in second reading, as well as the parliamentary allies, starting with the PNV, whose proposal for the Secrets Law continues to be kidnapped by the PSOE in the parliamentary commission, in which a hundred extensions of the amendment process have already been approved to prevent the rule from reaching the presentation phase and being raised to full. The initial registration of the PNV law in Congress is seven years old, and it was registered again in 2020, as soon as the legislature started. Partners and allies are convinced that the reason for the PSOE's resistance to a more lax law, similar to those in our environment, has to do with the transition, the 23-F coup d'état and the dirty war against ETA.

But that does not mean that the draft law has been received with an outright rejection. All the groups, starting with the government partner, admit that the text supposes an evident modernization of the current regulations, which is a law of the Franco regime slightly modified in the transition, because it updates and normalizes the criteria to establish information restrictions and incorporates four categories for encoded material that allow it to be harmonized with NATO and EU requirements.

In this sense, the PNV received as “good news” that the announcement of the draft bill “arrives late”, and at the same time, questions whether the processing can be completed in this legislature. The PNV spokesman in Congress, Aitor Esteban, stressed that his group has not been consulted or informed by the Government, despite the fact that his law is still stuck in the commission. Esteban stresses that, based on the information published in the press, "the deadlines seem exaggeratedly long, more than double what we proposed", which means that this rule "is not comparable" to the countries of our European environment, and in this sense , consider the document handled by the Government as "disappointing". The other two preferred partners of the coalition government, ERC and EH-Bildu, have expressed themselves in similar terms.

The Basque nationalists are a bull toreado in the matter of Official Secrets, because during the processing of its text, already in the previous legislature, the PSOE already showed its cards in the form of amendments. That is why they emphasize that they will study the text paying special attention to the "criteria and deadlines established for the declassification of documents and if there is a moratorium for its application." This issue of the moratorium affects all documents whose secrecy period has expired when the rule was approved. The PNV has always been in favor of automatic declassification, but the PSOE prefers that there be a grace period.

In this regard, another point of friction with United We Can is whether the declassifications are automatic, as the minority partner wants, or by expressly requesting the document, as the socialists claim. In practice, protest from Podemos, this would mean that a lot of material would never be made public, because to request the declassification of a file "first you have to know that it exists."