Official secrets and the 'gag' law, the locks of the Deep State. To the failure of the negotiation of the repeal of the law for the Protection of Citizen Security, known as the 'gag' law – a reform that died in the Interior Commission, without reaching the plenary session due to the vote against ERC and EH-Bildu– Everything indicates that the long-overdue reform of the Official Secrets Law is going to join, which will have to wait for better luck in future legislatures. Meanwhile, the Francoist law of 1968 will remain in force.
Strictly speaking, there is still time for the Government to send a project to the Cortes, which would serve to save the file for the Executive, claiming to have complied.
But the truth is that there is no material time for the parliamentary process, considering the deadlines that we have just experienced with the frustrated reform of the law for the Protection of Citizen Security.
The executive has not reached a prior agreement on the general terms with those who would be its natural partners in the final approval that changes the historic law of Official Secrets.
This especially concerns the PNV, which has struggled to process its own law since 2016 without being able to overcome the locks that the PP and PSOE have been establishing on the declassification of documents.
The PNV even agreed to support the Pedro Sánchez executive promoting a reform of the law. But it does not advance. In August of last year, the jetlzale formation already expressed its deep disappointment with the executive's draft law, which again established desperate declassification deadlines and some cat flaps through which to achieve the purpose that seems to encourage PSOE and PP regarding the Confidential documentation: that the most compromising documents related to the Transition, the attempted coup of 23-F 1981 and the dirty war against ETA (the GAL) of the 1980s and 1990s continue to be closed.
The draft that was then approved by the council of ministers included the expected “automatic declassification” of the documentation in fixed, non-discretionary terms, but expanded the types of opaque documentation to four: restricted, confidential, secret and top secret. For these last two, the truly delicate ones, it established terms of 40 and 50 years respectively, plus possible extensions of 10 years in the first case and 15 in the second.
This shielding of the documents relating to the seventies and eighties was a jug of cold water for the partners and allies of the PSOE, and no progress has been made in any rapprochement since then, which does not allow us to think of an agile processing in Congress, and even less entering the electoral semester.
It is eloquent that the two laws that govern the action and democratic control over the State Security Forces and Corps are going to be practically the only legislative projects committed by the coalition for this legislature that do not reach the goal.
The same forces, ERC and EH-Bildu, that knocked down the partial reform agreed by PSOE, UP and PNV in the commission, which repealed 40 articles of the Law for the Protection of Citizen Security of Fernández Díaz – which basically regulates the rights of citizens before the forces of order – assured the day of their vote against that there was time to process a new text and even announced an initiative in this regard. But neither has it been carried out nor, as in the case of Official Secrets, there seems to be a realistic deadline.
Of the rest of the important regulations of the mandate, after the approval of the Housing law – which has seen a change in the behavior of the allies of the investiture bloc –, only the Families law remains, which is being processed these weeks in Congress and for which United We Can is doing the rest in the negotiations.
The stumbling block, as we saw with the Housing law, is that the regulation concerns matters –such as education, health, social services or housing– that are the responsibility of the autonomous communities, so the tug of war can occur in the terms that we live last week. However, the groups are optimistic about approval in the short term.
