Recurrent: State Ports - Ministry of Transport
Resolution appealed: R/0046/2023
In exercise of his right of access to information, an individual filed a request addressed to the State Ports Agency, to obtain the list of out-of-agreement personnel, on the one hand, and the calls for public employment of this type of personnel, on the other, in both cases since 1992.
The agency issued a ruling declaring the application inadmissible when considering the application of the case provided for in article 18.1.c) LTAIBG, relating to the need to carry out a prior action of reprocessing of public information, as well as that contained in article 18.1.e) LTAIBG, considering that the application is of an unjustified abusive nature for the purpose of transparency of LTAIBG.
The Council considered the claim, as it did not consider any of the two cases of inadmissibility invoked by the Administration to be applicable.
Thus, with regard to the first of these, the Council considers that the fact that the information may be voluminous, as the body invokes, does not necessarily imply that it should be the subject of a new elaboration in order to be able to be disclosed. In this case, State Ports has not explained how it has organized the information available to it and what steps it should take to transform it into accessible information, an essential explanation to verify the reality of this need for reprocessing. The mere affirmation of the significant workload that this would entail and the shortage of personnel, without specifying the method in which the information is managed, is clearly insufficient to justify the application of this cause of inadmissibility whose effectiveness must be limited to those cases in which the information is dispersed and disseminated and, therefore, it is necessary to carry out complex previous operations to collect, order and systematize it.
With regard to article 18.1.e) LTAIBG, it is pointed out that the fact that the same claimant has submitted several requests to the same body does not make them abusive requests, it being necessary to check, on the one hand, whether they are manifestly repetitive requests from previous ones already resolved; or, on the other hand, because the request can hardly be considered to be an abuse of rights under article 7 of the Civil Code. In addition, the information requested is consistent with the purposes of the LTAIBG, since access to the information provides information on the manner in which personnel not subject to collective agreements have been provided, the positions of responsibility they occupy and the reasons why they left the post.