( Spanish) –– The Plenary Session of the National Institute of Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data of Mexico (INAI) considered this Wednesday that the reform under discussion in the Chamber of Deputies that seeks to eliminate seven autonomous bodies – including the INAI – violates the rights essentials of citizenship.
Through a position, the commissioners warned that the right to access to information, transparency and the protection of personal data will be at risk with the proposal presented in February by the then president Andrés Manuel López Obrador and promoted by president Claudia Sheinbaum .
“The defense of the Inai is not the defense of this Institute (…) it is the defense of two social conquests hard won by generations of Mexican men and women. Two social achievements that have been expressed in the exercise and guarantee of the human rights of access to information and protection of personal data,” warned Adrián Alcalá, president commissioner of the Institute.
The reform of extinction of autonomous bodies, which began to be discussed in the Lower House this Wednesday, proposes the elimination of the INAI, the Federal Economic Competition Commission (Cofece), the Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT), the National Evaluation Council of the Social Development Policy (Coneval), the National Hydrocarbons Commission (CNH), the Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE) and the National System for Continuous Improvement of Education.
Sheinbaum has defended the initiative by pointing out that the transparency mechanisms would continue, even if “an institution the size of Inai” disappears, and that the functions will pass to deconcentrated organizations with technical independence within the Secretariats of State.
The members of the organizations that are planned to be eliminated and some specialists say that this would have negative effects, since it would mean leaving in the hands of the government tasks that – in their vision – should correspond to autonomous bodies.
Representative Olga Sánchez Cordero, from the ruling Morena party, said that the reform safeguards the rights of Mexicans and “reduces the costs of its administration.”
“This change has been proposed not only to observe the duplication of functions that they imply, but also the need to improve their efficiency, simplify procedures and outline less onerous and more effective alternatives to fulfill their functions, since they do not disappear, they are preserved and strengthened. “, he said in the plenary session of the House during the discussion of the reform.
For their part, legislators from opposition parties counterargued that the disappearance of autonomous bodies is an authoritarian measure contrary to the balance of the exercise of power.
The discussion of the reform is expected to continue this Thursday with its vote and possible approval by the qualified majority of the deputies of the ruling alliance. If approved, it will go to the Senate, and then to the state congresses, as part of the process to make a constitutional reform valid.
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