President Mauricio Funes of El Salvador has decided to veto controversial amendments (text in Spanish) to the country’s Access to Public Information Law (ATPIL), according to an article in Diaro la Pagina.
The changes (text in Spanish) were passed Feb. 8 by the National Assembly. (See previous FreedomInfo.org report.)
Critics had called on the president to veto the amendments, saying they increased the government’s ability to classify documents and reduced the power of the Institute for Access to Information to make binding decisions.
The Grupo Promotor de la Ley de Transparencia y Acceso a la Información Pública, a network of 12 of organizations working on access to information in El Salvador, had urged President Funes to veto the amendment. (See statement in Spanish.)
The Fundación Salvadoreña para el Desarrollo Económico y Social (FUSADES) one of the institutions that presented a draft of the law in 2008, also had asked for a veto. The group, which is a member of the Grupo Promotor and also the Regional Alliance for Freedom of Expression and Information, prepared an analysis of the amendments (in Spanish).
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