The Government rules out carrying out a massive declassification of the secret documents accumulated since the approval of the current law (in 1968, in the midst of Franco's regime), up to the present.
The Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, alleges that the amount of documentation accumulated is "enormous", making it technically very difficult to undertake this task.
The documents on the last years of the Franco regime or the transition, although many of them are more than half a century old, will only come to light if the authority that classified them ex officio or at the request of an affected party so determines.
This is determined by the preliminary draft of the Classified Information Law that the Council of Ministers approved in the first round this Monday, despite the objections of the minority partner of the Government, United We Can, and the parliamentary allies.
It so happens that, in the pact that the PSOE reached in 2018 with the PP to reform this law, the Socialists proposed that all documents currently classified with more than 25 years have an extension of another decade under lock and key, while those who did not have this seniority would receive a moratorium of 10 years upon reaching the quarter of a century.
This formula will mean that in 2033 (the Government hopes that the law will be approved at the beginning of next year and enter into force six months later) all documents prior to 1998 will be automatically public. Instead, the risk of the system envisaged by the Government is that it can leave in the dark documents whose existence is unknown and that no one can claim.
The draft bill provides for four categories of classification: top secret, secret, confidential and reserved.
Secret documents will be automatically declassified after 50 years, secrets after 40, confidential between seven and ten years and restricted between four and six.
However, the classification of documents classified as top secret could be extended for another 15 years and that of secrets for ten.
Citizens may claim the declassification of a secret document, but it will be the Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court that will act as a filter and decide if the request is justified.
Judges who, in the course of an investigation, decide to claim a document classified as secret must go to the same Third Chamber.
The Commission of Reserved Funds of the Congress, as it happens now, will be the channel through which the deputies will be able to have access to classified documents.
The classification of top secret and secret documents will be the responsibility of the Council of Ministers, while ministers, secretaries of State, undersecretaries, directors of the secret service, the Police and the Civil Guard or Government Delegates may classify in the lower categories.
The system, according to Minister Bolaños, will be "reviewable";
that is, at any time the authority that classified a document may decide to make it public, without rushing the deadlines, although this could be conditioned by a future event, such as the death of an affected person or the end of a conflict, he pointed out.
Faced with criticism from his government partners and parliamentary allies and parliamentary allies for the excessive deadline set to automatically declassify secret documents, Bolaños assures that the text is "similar" to that of other democratic countries.
He alleges that in some of them (France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Belgium or Austria) there is no term and in others it is even higher, such as Sweden, with 70 years.
He acknowledges that there are countries with lower deadlines (such as Germany, with 30 years), but maintains that they apply the same expiration date to all documents, without distinguishing degrees of classification or provide numerous exceptions.