Caută 
3 MIN
Former Senator PNL (National Liberal Party) Eugen Vasiliu considers that in Romania there exists a real cult of secret. Mr. Vasiliu knows what he says. After years of trying to promote a law to rule the access to information, he could notice now, together with us all, as expected, that a law of state secret should be first adopted. The whole spirit of the legislative act and many of the wordings in the text are totally anachronistic, permeable to abuses, pretty close to the severe restrictions in the communist period. It is not quite surprising, after all given that one of the initiators of the law was a former "Securitate" colonel, Stefan David. A very definite expression of the major impact the former secret police continues to have on the Romanian society.
Unfortunately, this cult of the secret is deeply planted in the public memory, so many will not be, probably, quite shocked by the most excessive stipulations of the law. This is why the majority of the leaders of the institutions funded with public money or of public interest, form prefectures to police stations, treat the service information as personal gods. Moreover, this kind of mentalities are dominant in the interior of the commercial companies, including the private ones, so things that should be known by the majority of the employees remain kept secret in the chiefs’ offices.
The proclaiming of free access to public information is one of the most effective mechanisms of protection for democracy and of fight against corruption. The Americans, for instance, have such a law, which severely restraints the category of information considered sensitive for the national security. As for the rest, any citizen has the right to solicit access to information that was not included in that category. Important: not the one that solicits the information should justify his request, on the contrary, the refuse should be strongly motivated, or justice intervenes to oblige the institution to offer all the requested information to the solicitor.
Of course, people have all kinds of other business to solve than to permanently rummage in the archives of the public institutions, as nowhere in the world the servants in local and central administration are glad to offer the public this kind of information.
The main effect is one of psychological nature. The pressure of such a law discourages corruption in public institutions, offering the normal citizen an important lever in his relationship with a bureaucracy often arrogant. But the issue is far from being only one of big interest. The access to this kind of data and well-placed relationship brought to some people fortunes of million dollars. Well "drawn up" conditions of contract for the ample public auctions or all kind of data kept secret were the rule, rather than the exception in the last 11 years.
By voting the law of state secret a dangerous inversion actually took place. Instead of obliging first the public institutions to offer information and then to rule exactly which are the ones that could affect the national security, so that no interpretation abuse be possible, they did it upside down. Very attentive with the protection of state information, we don’t care at all about the most important individual rights. So there is no initiative that rule what should really be protected: private information.
The battle for transparency is one that exceeds the frame of the law of state secret. The safeness of economy and the effectiveness of central and local governing mostly depend on it. A fearful and frustrated society, dominated by the cult of secret, fundamentally remains vulnerable to the authoritarian skids.
(Alexandru LAZESCU )
