Chile

The only incidents affecting press freedom were minor ones connected to the campaign for the December election. And because of pending election, various initiatives in Congress to modify the legal basis for the practice of journalism have not moved forward. The new law of transparency and freedom of information approved in August, 2008 went into effect in April. It provides for a Transparency Council, a specialized technical body, with broad supervisory oversight powers that will consider and rule on cases in which officials refuse to provide information. To comply with the requirement of “active transparency,” the administration is updating information on its Web pages. Compliance is more difficult in local governments, although by September they had all fulfilled their obligation to put up a Web page. However, an academic study showed that they provided only 27% of the information required and it was mediocre. The government tried to improve the system by setting up one Web site, www.portaldetransparencia.ci, to organize all the information, but the weak search function limits its usefulness. With respect to “passive transparency,” as of July 30, 9,017 requests for information had been made to 275 government agencies, and 82.4% had received a positive response. Denials of information can be appealed to the Council. As of August 28, 2009, the Transparency Council had received 271 appeals of denials of information. Seventy percent of the 86 decisions had been made by that time ordered that the information be released. The most complex problem in applying the law involves semigovernmental entities, such as National Television, the Copper Corporation, the State Bank, the National Petroleum Company and Metro. The Transparency Council holds that they are required to have active transparency and therefore should publish payments to the director, president, vice president, managing directors and senior administrators. This matter may be decided by the courts At the beginning of 2009, President Michelle Bachelet sent to the Chamber of Deputies a proposed subsitute for the deficient and unnecessary bill to enact a journalists´ law. The Chilean Journalists Association said the president´s bill is unnecesary because it regulates matters that are already covered. The bill has aspects of doubtful constitutionality and significance such as saying that journalists are responsible for their work . These aspects are associated with the intention to return to the obligatory licensing of journalists. The bill was approved in the Chamber of Deputies. In the second step in the Senate, it was moved to the Constitution, Legislation, Justice and Regulation Committee, which has not yet considered it. Several bills have been offered concerning privacy and press freedom. The best one was drafted jointly by the administration, law professors and profesional media associations. However, it was rejected almost unanimously by the Chamber of Deputies. Another bill, sent to the Senate years ago, was approved in 2001 but languished in the Chamber of Deputies. Two years ago it was decided for unknown reasons to bring it up again. It is on the top of the agenda of the Special Press Freedom Committeee, but it has not yet been taken up because it has failed in the committee´s last six sessions for lack of a quórum. A bill presented by legislators of the Regionalist Independent Party (PRI) later revised and approved unanimously the Chamber´s Internal Government Committee would prohibit the pubication of surveys and opinion polls in the days before an election. The government supports the bill, which would impose a restriction that has already been rejected as wrong and unnecessary. Legislators Maximiano Errázurriz, Amelia Herrera and Claudia Nogueira introduced a bill, written by Errázurriz, which would prevent prosecutors from speaking to journalists during an investigation. The argument in favor of the bill highlights the intention of returning to the “secret indictment” that was typical of the inquisitorial nature of the old criminal procedure. Two of the three legislators who sponsored the bill have recently been investigated. On September 1, opposition figure Sebastián Piñera announced his candidacy. The party´s leaders refused to allow four reporters and two photographers of the government newspaper La Nación, which has campaigned strongly against the candidate, to cover the event. Later, the candidate himself overturned the decisión. On September 26, 2009, a group of journalists and photographers trying to cover a reenactment in a malpractice case were attacked by security guards at the Regional Hospital of Talca. The Talca prosecutor has opened an investigation of the incident.