On 20th January of this year, the President of the Republic of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, signed the decree that partially regulates Law 1712 of 2014, better known as the Law on Transparency. The law aims to regulate the right of access to public information and procedures for exercising this, and the guarantee of the right of access to national public information.

This decree was supported by the European Union through technical assistance, workshops and experience exchange visits held within the framework of EUROsociAL II. These were complemented by the European Union Anti-Corruption and Transparency project, ACTUE Colombia.  

The signing event included the participation of senior representatives of the National Moralisation Commission and the Citizen Commission for Fighting Corruption, with which President Santos also held parallel meetings to review the progress made in this area during the past year based on the Comprehensive Public Anti-Corruption Policy (PPIA) in December 2013.

In his speech, Santos stressed the importance of the decree and the law on access to information as “perhaps the most powerful instruments citizens have to exercise control and oversight over how public resources are handled”.

The decree includes fundamental aspects for effective application of the Law, such as general guidelines for the publication of public information, guidelines for information accessibility, mechanisms for managing requests for public information (passive transparency), management of classified and reserved information, instruments for management of public information or monitoring of information management.

This initiative is part of the EUROsociAL “Strengthening social and institutional collaboration in the fight against corruption” action, which is coordinated by the FIIAPP with the CEDDET Foundation as its operational partner.  Since 2012, the Colombian Secretariat of Transparency has received support in the design of different aspects of its comprehensive anti-corruption policy and in the implementation of various components of same.

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