President of El Salvador Mauricio Funes has named the commissioners of the Public Information Access Institute after 15 months of delays, and 10 days after vetoing a reform that would have weakened the new body, said El Faro.
Funes justified the delays, saying the institute’s budget had been too small and citing a lack of suitable candidates for the posts, said EFE.
Upon naming the commissioners, Funes said that “a new level of transparency starts with this government” and announced the online publication of more than 40,000 documents containing public information, according to the newspaper La Página.
The public information access law was passed by the El Salvadoran congress in March 2011. However, the law lacked a regulator that would obligate government offices to respond to information requests.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
