Lawsuit to protect the right of access to public intelligence information
Dejusticia filed a lawsuit challenging Decree 857 of 2014, which regulates the Colombian Law of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, for violating some of the necessary requirements that must be fulfilled before the right of access to public information held by intelligence agencies can be restricted.
Decree 857 of 2014 was issued by the National Government to regulate the Intelligence and Counterintelligence Law (Law 1621 of 2013).
The first paragraph of Article 5, Article 6 and Article 10 of the Decree seek to regulate the withholding of information, ignoring the standards established in the jurisprudence and in the Law. For its part, the third paragraph of article 9 and paragraph 1 of article 19 of the Decree establish the creation of new ways to withhold information that were not created in the Intelligence and Counterintelligence Law, for example, the keeping of the intelligence manuals and of the resumes, the profiles or the data of the public intelligence and counterintelligence servers, and of contractors who carry out these activities.
In the application, we contend that the foregoing articles violate the President’s regulatory power, the principle of legal withdrawal, and the requirements established by the Intelligence Act itself and by the Law on Transparency and Access to Public Information in order to withhold public information.