Spain seeks to tighten state secrecy law - and doesn't want to hear any objections

Most countries have laws that protect some types of government information and military secrets and restrict their disclosure to the public at large. The balance to be struck between necessary confidentiality and public accountability can be fraught, but that discussion is fundamental to the way democracies operate. Spain's current secrecy law dates right back 1968, before the country's transition to democracy - so it is certainly ripe for reconsideration.

Unfortunately, a new draft law published by Spain's government on 3 August not only seeks to tighten the law in ways that would place new obstacles and risks in the path of whistleblowers, journalists and public accountability, but appears to aim to do this without broader consent. The draft was accompanied by an unrealistically short timescale for civil society and others to assess the proposals and comment on them.

Nine days provides a notably inadequate opportunity for proper consideration of legislation at any time of year, still less in August, when many potential consultees are likely to be on holiday.

Blueprint is one of many civil society organisations and individual experts who have signed a joint letter condemning the Spanish government's lack of commitment to transparency and calling for a longer consultation period.

Unfortunately, these transparency issues are something we've seen before with the Spanish government's attitude to whistleblowing. The transposition of the EU Whistleblowing Directive is still pending in Spain - despite the formal deadline for doing so passing over six months ago.

Spain's government belatedly published a draft whistleblowing law in March this year. Blueprint, among many other organisations, has suggested improvements to this draft - among those improvements are ensuring that the law covers the full range of issues a whistleblower might want to make a report about, to focus evaluation on the content of the report rather than the motivation of the whistleblower and to ensure that a whistleblower has the freedom to report to the body he or she has most confidence in. We are still waiting to see a revised draft that takes account of these issues.

Our concerns are only heightened by the proposals included in this new draft law on state secrecy. Among the changes the Spanish government is considering are the introduction of multi-million Euro fines for the dissemination of classified documents, long classification periods (65 years) and the lack of scope for declassification of information that should be in the public domain. In a country like Spain, where struggles for justice resulting from events in the Franco era are still current, that is particularly important.

Despite the European Court of Human Rights affirming the need for safe ways for all whistleblowers to make reports, including those working in sensitive government jobs (whose reporting channels might be differnet from those in less sensitive occupations), in reality whistleblowers whose disclosures touch on security issues or other kinds of state secrets often find themselves in a precarious legal position.

National security whistleblowing is the subject of an explicit carve out in the EU Whistleblowing Directive, so protections for national security whistleblowers - and the fundamental balance between secrecy and openness necessary to ensure public accountability - need to be debated and legislated for on the national level. Spain is unlikely to get that balance right if critical voices are excluded from the discussion.