The Council for Transparency and Good Governance (CTBG) organized a seminar on access to public information in Madrid on 6 and 7 May, entitled “Case handling workshop on freedom of information”, attended by representatives of 13 other European commissioners and transparency councils.

In the seminar, representatives of the European Ombudsman and of the transparency councils and commissioners of Germany, Albania, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Kosovo, Luxembourg, Portugal, Macedonia, Slovenia, United Kingdom and Switzerland made presentations and contributed their point of view with a practical approach; and the data journalist Daniele Grasso (El País) spoke about journalism and access to public information.

The meeting served to compare different aspects of national laws on transparency, the configuration of independent bodies that monitor compliance, share good practices, discuss common challenges and difficulties and analyze specific cases on how access to public information is addressed in each country, among other issues.

The president of the CTBG, José Luis Rodríguez Álvarez, stressed at the opening of the seminar that, although the transparency legislation in Spain is recent compared to other European countries, the progress in the ten years since the transparency law was approved has been very significant. He reviewed the challenges still pending to achieve in Spain the full transparency of public institutions, and explained the main lines of work carried out by the Transparency Council to guarantee the right of all people to public information.

For her part, the head of the Support Unit of the CTBG, Isabel Lombardero Lasarte, explained the Spanish regulation on proactive transparency (active advertising), that is, the information of public interest that entities obliged by law must publish on their web pages or transparency portal, and stressed the role played by the Council to assess compliance with these obligations, using the MESTA methodology itself.

Transparency and the use of algorithms in decision-making processes by public administrations focused the intervention of the Deputy Director General of Transparency and Good Governance of the CTBG, Gonzalo Gómez de Villalobos.