As part of the maneuver for development, the government headed by Mario Monti would have the opportunity to introduce a cost-free reform, with a great impact on collective psychology and concrete behaviour, consisting in the inversion of the point of view of public administrations and managers of public services as regards their relations with citizens.
For reasons that cannot even be summarized here, Italy has historically been very distant from public administration systems which grant the citizen an equal position vis-à-vis the public authorities. This detachment has produced and preserved over time styles of behavior in places of power self-referential to the point of arrogance.
President Monti and his government immediately launched signals of great transparency on one's personal and financial conditions and with them there is no need to dwell on the fact that the contagion of opacity between politics, administration and the economy is hopeless and that entrenchment of administrations creates stickiness, mortifies dynamism, competition and the development of new ideas.
The current rule of relations between state and citizen, altered with respect to the clear text elaborated in 1990 under the direction of Sabino Cassese, is found in the current version of the law on administrative procedure. Currently, the request to view or extract a copy of an administrative document must be "motivated" and referred to a "direct, concrete and current interest, corresponding to a legally protected situation", a fact that has distorted the broad reference to transparency of the law original. The Italian laws in force differ completely from what is foreseen elsewhere (see England, the United States and even the homeland of administrative law, France) and in our country they come to be insulting, because while the law on administrative procedure applies in general, the principle of tacit consent which is formed within thirty days, for access to documents, the tacit refusal is applied in the same period of time. Namely that the administration doesn't even have to justify the refusal and it's enough for me to hang around for a month.
Again last week the general manager of an important public body declared, in the presence of a lively controversy over the maneuvers concerning the real estate assets of the same body, that "administrative choices are not the subject of comparison and disclosure" with employees and trade unions, let alone citizens and journalists. The Extraordinary Commissioner for the waste emergency in Lazio said yesterday in a filmed interview that he knows the name of the owners of the area in the name of a Swiss anonymous company on which the future Rome landfill will be built, but that he has no intention of revealing it to the press. Journalists are defined as "aggressive" if they ask to know in full detail how to purchase a property owned by a minister from a public body.
All of this, notoriously, it would be inconceivable in any other G7 country. Indeed, the most authoritative democracies have long ago introduced the right to almost total accessibility to information and documents held by public administrations, which can be requested and copied by anyone who wishes, without the need for motivation or explanation.
This right is established inart. 42 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union with regard to the documents of the Community bodies and since 2008 it has also been expressed in a specific Convention of the Council of Europe (to which 46 countries adhere in addition to Italy). It acknowledges that the right of access to "official documents" "promotes the integrity, efficiency and effectiveness and responsibility of public authorities" and establishes that no reason must be requested to have access to a document .
The transparency of the work, of the deeds and of the information held by the public authorities is everywhere considered fundamental for the fight against corruption and collusion. It is the first rule of a public manager who must remedy a situation of dubious legality. And it is the rule most detested by those who use public office as an instrument of personal power.
Without prejudice to the protection of real privacy rights, which are recognized and practiced everywhere in advanced democracies without prejudice to the rules of access to information and administrative documents, the field of transparency has also been plowed thanks to intense operational programs that make clarity, knowledge and sharing of public decisions a punctual daily research.
We continue to talk about transparency, the information society, networks, open data and public participation in Italy without affecting the tautological heart of the problem: information held by a public entity tends to be information of public interest and must be accessible to anyone, Not the other. Excluding personal information concerning health and opinions and those concerning the integrity of the State or intellectual property, for all other information, managed in the interest of all citizens, there is no reason that it should be made tiring or impossible to access, which is instead the primary purpose of the rules in force in Italy. Elsewhere in the world the debate has developed to the point that the concept of the "right to think" of administrations has been elaborated, i.e. that an internal note or a note preliminary to a decision can be (but up to a certain point) upon access.
Overturning the point of view on citizens' rights vis-à-vis public administrations in Italy would mean starting to dry up the water in which small and large undeclarable interests thrive and establish a rule of transparency which can then spread like wildfire in all sectors of the economy. There seems to be a great deal of need for this in order to encourage initiatives for lasting development.
