According to the Journalist Statute, the right of journalists to access information sources must be guaranteed by the organisms of public administration, and whoever refuses that access may be legally prosecuted “with urgency” (art. 8). This applies not only to journalists: in the name of “transparency of public affairs”, everyone has the right of access to administrative documents from the public sector, with “no need to invoke any particular interest” (law nr. 46/2007).
Because the law is sometimes disrespected, or because the interpretations of what falls under the category of restricted information may be divergent, a special commission works next to the Parliament (since 1995) as an instance of appeal. Every year, about 400 hundred complaints are brought to this “Commission of Access to Administrative Documents” (http://www.cada.pt/), several of them presented by journalists.
Traditionally, the Portuguese public administration tended to be very closed and to keep most of its documents secret, but this behaviour is slowly changing. Sometimes, journalists complain that public administration, although not forbidding access to this or that information (because of the law), raises practical problems of consultation, obliging them to seek what they are looking for among hundreds and hundreds of files. This is why the work of the aforementioned Commission is important.
