The excuses have increased, the pretexts for not making information transparent, on the one hand, and also (…) they answer with inaccuracies, deliberately, to make the claimant of the information feel frustrated and no longer continue the battle that, fortunately, each time more citizens continue it towards the Inai”.
Francisco Javier Acuña Llamas, ex-president commissioner of the INAI.
After the plenary session of the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data (Inai) has been unable to meet since April 1, 2023 due to a lack of commissioners, former presidents of the body urged the Senate to appoint the three missing members of the plenary session, while pointing out that the current situation is part of the federal government’s disdain for the institution, in addition to a violation of the rights of access to information and protection of personal data.
Jacqueline Peschard Mariscal, former commissioner of the Institute, considered that given the lack of a legal quorum in the plenary session of the Institute, citizens lose the possibility of consulting public information “ranging from how government resources are spent, in the field of security, in the field of combating crime, in the field of education, etc.
In addition to the fact that on the subject of personal data protection there is no possibility of accessing “the use of our clinical records”, for example.
He added that another problem that arises is that decisions cannot be made in the face of citizen complaints due to failures in compliance with obligations of transparency, or data protection, by federal institutions.
Opacity
Francisco Javier Acuña Llamas, the last INAI commissioner to leave office, considered that if the federal Executive began to make estimates of how much the INAI costs, the opacity and dysfunction of the State would have a greater cost.
He stated that “the only way to be able to measure, to a certain extent, how the Public Administration behaves towards citizens, is through the service provided by the INAI”.
Acuña Llamas emphasized that in the current federal administration “the excuses have increased, the pretexts for not making information transparent, on the one hand, and also (…) they answer with inaccuracies, deliberately, to make the claimant of the information feel frustrated and the battle no longer continues, which, fortunately, more and more citizens continue towards the Inai”.
According to the Global Compliance Index of Transparency Portals, by 2022, the federal Executive averaged 95.7 points, behind the 100 of the Judicial and Legislative branches.
María Marván Laborde opined that the lack of appointments of commissioners could respond to an intention of the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to paralyze the INAI and described as “tyranny” the fact that the senators of Morena are told that the president prefers to extend the appointments; This is based on the alleged statements made by the Secretary of the Interior, Adán López.
Marván assured that “since the president was head of government of the Federal District, the transparency laws have been extremely uncomfortable for him.”
