Vicente González (governor)

Transcription

I'll start by telling you the story of Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska, who then became the nominee for Vice President of the USA. Journalists wanted to know who Sarah Palin was, what she did while being governor, so they asked for a copy of her email correspondence. The Alaska administration said "it's a lot of work, ..." "... we can't do that". Even worse, it was found out that Palin had used personal email accounts to handle state matters, but journalists said "not my problem..." "go and search in the inboxes of public servants who received the emails..." "find those emails, I want access to them." The state government said it was too much work, and that it was too expensive, but journalists insisted, and three years later, after paying 725 US dollars for printing costs, each media company that had requested them received a copy, several boxes with 24.000 pages of printed out and redacted Sarah Palin's emails. Weeks later, the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in the US, scanned the emails and created a web with an interface similar to the one from GMail, where anybody could go and read Sarah Palin's emails as if you were herself. Can you imagine this happening in Spain? Briefly, as I have only a minute left... This is not 'political science fiction' This - as they say on TV - "it's happening now" And it's happening because in 90 countries around the world there are freedom of information laws which state that all the information handled by a public administration is, by default, public unless there are national security or personal privacy concerns. Walter Lippman, one of the most important journalists of the last century, said "There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies" The right to access information is recognised by many human rights tribunals like the European Court of Human Rights, as being fundamentally linked to freedom of speech. We can't be citizens, we can't participate in society, if we don't know what's going on, how public matters are being handled. Journalists in other countries have used these laws to investigate where the money of bail-outs is going, whether pharmaceutical companies bribe doctors, or, in Ireland, how much does an official trip cost? who travels with the minister to India? Or - this is something that impressed me a lot - the mobile phone bill of the Irish prime minister while negotiating their bail-out. Who did he call? How long where the calls? This is real. This has been published. In UK there was a big scandal related to parliamentary expenses; several MPs were charging unjustified expenses for their second residences or even claiming the cost of a 'duck island' at a summer residence. More than twenty-five parliamentaries stepped down or didn't stand up for re-election, four MPs and two lords were sent to jail. But this is not something only for journalists: anyone can ask in a country with a Freedom of Information law. WhatDoTheyKnow.com is a UK-based web which holds more than 130.000 questions. We've done the same in Spain, and it's called tuderechoasaber.es The Spanish access to information law will arrive to the parliament over the next few days, we still don't have the law, but we'll do soon, in a few months. It's not a good law, all the experts agree, but we'd like to encourage you to use it, to ask questions, and to demand a response. Thanks a lot everyone.