Transparency for democracy: Twenty years after the Claude Reyes v. Chile judgment

This year marks two decades since a ruling that changed the way we understand transparency. In Claude Reyes et al. v. Chile, the Inter-American Court recognized access to public information as a fundamental human right. Information ceased to be something that the authorities could deliver at their discretion and became a right that citizens could demand. Its recognition represented a significant advance for democracy: it strengthened accountability, provided new tools to combat corruption, and established a "key right" that facilitates the exercise of other rights. Chile built a coherent institutional architecture: it constitutionally enshrined the publicity of public acts, passed a law that made the right of access to information enforceable, and created an autonomous guarantor body. The achievements of that first stage today reveal their limits. We have consolidated the right of access, although we continue to manage transparency with an excessively reactive logic. Instead of facilitating its exercise, the system still depends on the citizen knowing what to ask, where to look, and how to complain. Contemporary opacity no longer consists solely of hiding documents. It also exists when information is published but scattered across different platforms, trapped in PDF files, disconnected from the background needed to understand or reconstruct a decision, or presented in language inaccessible to the ordinary citizen. We can have abundant public information available and, nevertheless, have an opaque State that is difficult to oversee. The challenge is to consolidate transparency as a fundamental pillar of the public integrity ecosystem, articulating it with the rules on lobbying, probity, prevention of conflicts of interest, and state contracting. At the same time, new technologies offer the opportunity to transform how it works, advancing from the request to automatic access, from the document to the data, and from formal publicity to effective transparency. To achieve this, transparency must be incorporated into the design and functioning of a modern State. If an enormous volume of records is already digitally registered, a large part of that information—safeguarding legal exceptions—should be available from its origin, without the need for new administrative procedures or citizen requests. Active transparency must take on a central role as the guiding principle of the right of access to information, grounded in the principles of open data and plain language. But publishing is not enough. Interoperable systems are needed that make it possible to relate the records and understand not only what an authority decided, but also who intervened, what information was considered, and what happened afterward with public resources. Claude Reyes marked a turning point. The next frontier is to turn transparency into the infrastructure of the State: information available by default, data that speak to each other, public decisions that leave a verifiable trail, and oversight that can anticipate abuse. The real challenge is for transparency to stop depending on citizens' ability to search for information and become a permanent condition for knowing, evaluating, and overseeing the exercise of public power. Only then will we ensure that the establishment of such a relevant right strengthens a democracy that must always be at the service of the people. By Gloria de la Fuente, former president of the Council for Transparency, president of Fundación Horizonte Ciudadano and professor at the UC School of Government, and Jorge Jaraquemada, former president of the Council for Transparency and executive director of Fundación Jaime Guzmán NEWSLETTER Opinion Saturday, AM Ideas in tension, opposing views, and clear analysis: elements to uncover the issues that divide opinions and will shape the agenda. By signing up you are accepting the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policies of La Tercera.