Official secrets and gag law, the padlocks of the Deep State. To the failure of the negotiation of the repeal of the Citizen Security Protection law, known as the gag law – a reform that died in the Interior committee, without reaching the plenary due to the vote against ERC and EH Bildu -, everything points to the long-overdue reform of the Official Secrets law, which will have to wait for better luck in the next legislatures. In the meantime, the law of Francoism, from 1968, will remain in force.
Strictly speaking, there is still time for the central government to send a project to the Courts, which would serve to save the file in the Executive, claiming to have complied.
But the truth is that there is no material time to carry out the parliamentary procedure, taking into account the deadlines we have just experienced with the failed reform of the Citizen Security Protection law.
The Executive has not reached a prior agreement on the general terms with whom their natural partners should be in the final approval that changes the historic Official Secrets law.
This particularly concerns the PNB, which has struggled to process its own law since 2016 without being able to overcome the padlocks that have been established by the PP and the PSOE on the declassification of documents.
The PNB even agreed to support the fact that the Executive of Pedro Sánchez promoted a reform of the law. But it doesn't move forward. In August, the Jeltzal formation already expressed its deep disappointment with the draft law of the Executive, which once again established some desperate declassification deadlines and some cats for achieving the purpose that seems to encourage the PSOE and the PP regarding the reserved documentation: that the documents that could be more compromising about the transition, the attempted coup d'état of 23-F of 1981 and the dirty war against ETA (the GAL) of the 1980s and ninety
The draft that was then approved by the Council of Ministers included the expected "automatic declassification" of 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 years in the second.
This shielding of the documents relating to the 1970s and 1980s 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 about an agile processing in the Congress, let alone entering the electoral semester.
It is eloquent that the two laws that govern the action and democratic control over the forces and security bodies of the State are practically the only legislative projects committed by the coalition for this legislature that do not reach the finish line.
The same forces, ERC and EH Bildu, that overthrew the partial reform agreed by the PSOE, UP and the PNB in the commission that repealed 40 articles of Fernández Díaz's Citizen Security Protection law - which basically regulates the rights of citizens in front of the police -, they assured on the day of the vote against that there was time to process a new text, and even announced an initiative in this regard. But neither has it been done nor, as in the case of Official Secrets, does it seem that there are realistic deadlines.
Of the rest of the important rules 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 Family law remains, which is being processed these weeks in Congress and for which Unides Podemos is pressing the accelerator in the negotiations.
The pitfall, as was seen with the recent Housing law, is that the rule affects matters - such as education, health, social services or housing - that are the competence of the autonomous communities, so that it stretches -arronsa can be in the terms we experienced last week. However, the groups are optimistic about approving it in the short term.
