Two examples of claudican transparency

The protection of data and the secrets of state

Abstract

Transparency has to make its way and outline itself as a right in terms of equality with others already recognized in our legal system. When it comes to delivering to citizens documents that constitute public information, many times interpretations are made, or norms are approved, not very close to the principle of proportionality, in which the limits to transparency end up prevailing, at the expense of the public interest that it represents.

This article develops this idea by critically commenting assumptions that transparency yields for the benefit of data protection or classified matters. These are really very different matters, but in which, in the author's opinion, the greatest problems that transparency has raised are currently focused on occupying the space that, as a right of democratic deepening, corresponds to it: in the first case, by the influence of European Union Law and the entry into force of the new Data Protection Regulation and, in the second case, by the existence in Spain of a law on official secrets that should accommodate current times.