The appearance of the President of the Government in Congress following the pegasus case It ended with some promises that were difficult to keep and with repeated explanations about the espionage to the Catalan and Basque independentistas that did not convince the ERC, Junts per Catalunya and EH Bildu and not even the PNV. Pedro Sánchez made two announcements: the reform of the organic law regulating the National Intelligence Center (CNI) to reinforce “control guarantees” and ensure “maximum respect for individual and political rights”, and the approval of a new law of classified information to replace the current official secrets law, which dates back to the Franco regime (it was approved in 1968 and slightly retouched in 1978) and which, incomprehensibly, is still in force.
The two promises go in the right direction with the risk that they will go nowhere, since The Government does not have the absolute majority essential to carry out the reform of the control of the CNI as it is an organic law. And even if the proposals were more daring than the intentions expressed by the President of the Government indicate (expanding the Supreme Court magistrates who supervise the excuses from one to three seems insufficient), without a broader explanation of whether the facts were limited to the challenge of 2017 and not to the undue control of other aspects of ordinary political life (within the limits advisable for foreign relations and the proper functioning of the intelligence services) and without an acknowledgment and correction of the security errors that affected to the communications of the Executive, the reform and review of the legislative framework is only part of the reaction that can be demanded of it.
Members of the Government acknowledge that at the moment there is no majority to approve the reform due to the presumable rejection of the usual members of the Executive, irritated by the issue of espionage. Not even in the Government itself can it be said that there is an agreement on the reform of the secret services, in view of the positions of United We Can. Repeating on this issue the majority that the audiovisual law saved this Thursday seems unlikely, neither for the stability of the government coalition nor in the face of a constructive will that the PP has yet to prove. Under these conditions, it is irresponsible to make announcements that later become mere toasts to the sun. A promise in the air provides a headline, but without effective commitments behind it, it only creates an illusion. And it is even more dangerous to hope that it magically becomes a reality, a temptation to which Sánchez seems inclined when he maintains, for example, that the Pegasus controversy ran its course after the appearance and subsequent resignation of the director of the CNI.
Refering to new official secrets law, the Government could count on the support of the PNV, which has spent three years requesting the modification and updating of the regulations so that the terms are cut to 25 years to declassify secret papers and to 10 for reserved documents. In the difficult balance between informative transparency and security, looking at the past should lean even more clearly towards the former; The secrecy that has marked Spanish regulation until now seems more marked by the pacts of silence of the Transition that are no longer justifiable than by the guarantees of State security.