“Access to information cannot be held hostage by anyone”: INAI Commissioner

“Transparency, accountability, access to information and the protection of personal data cannot be held hostage to anyone, much less to interests outside this issue,” said Commissioner Norma Julieta del Río Venegas during the start of the National Institute's annual Transparency Week on Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data (INAI).

The one in 2021 is entitled “The Value of Information: Inclusion and Equality in the Age of Transparency” and Julieta del Río, in the State of Zacatecas, was in charge of opening the event.

From 27 September to 1 October, activities will take place with the aim of making visible the importance of access to information, transparency and the protection of personal data for people in vulnerable situations and thus employ a strategy to improve the conditions for the dissemination of knowledge and to enable them to exercise their rights.

President Blanca Lilia emphasized that this edition was distributed in four regions of different states. For his part, the governor of Zacatecas, David Monreal Ávila, said: “The information generated by the State must be public forever and therefore must belong to society; I am convinced that, with policies of transparency, we can predict the future and leave a more equitable and equal world, so he welcomed the fact that topics to be reflected in this event are policies for the inclusion of people in situations of vulnerability”.

Blanca Lilia said that the event “falls within the framework of access to information that we commemorate every September 28 and where the theme of this 2021 is the right to know, to rebuild better with access to information whose main objective is to accelerate (...) the objectives of the 2030 agenda.”

He also pointed out that transparency is fundamental to achieving equality and inclusion in the right to know, which work for the democratization of information. He also gave figures of those who are within the issues of the equality and inclusion agenda: “to the 9.3 million living in extreme poverty, to 56.1% of the population that has an informal work, as well as to historically discriminated groups such as girls, boys and adolescents, older adults, indigenous people, people with disabilities, migrants, agricultural day laborers”.

Commissioner Adrián Alcalá said that the inauguration coincided with the 200th anniversary of the consummation of Mexico's independence and mentioned that INAI celebrates two fundamental rights that are access to information and the protection of personal data.

From Quintana Roo he recalled that the organization of National Transparency Week began since 2004, when it was called the Federal Institute for Access to Public Information (IFAI), which at that time was to follow up on the difficulties of the Law that was promulgated in the Official Gazette of the Federation on June 11 of 2002.

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