Il diritto di accesso agli atti interni

We study, within the framework of the Italian law system, the right to access internal documents held by public authority. Our general aim is to investigate the limits of this right in order to find the proper means to improve the existing system. In Italian law an administrative procedure is composed by internal documents and by a final decision document called provvedimento. Ordinarily the internal documents have no effects on the citizens and for this reason are regarded as not accessible. With the Administrative procedure law (law n. 241 of 1990) the rule has been introduced that all internal documents are accessible. For the Italian law the object of the right to access is not the information but the administrative documents in themselves. The administrative documents include all the internal documents of the administrative procedure. The information not included inside an administrative document is not accessible. A particular object of our investigation is to discover if there are any exemptions to the rule that all internal documents are accessible. Besides, since even today some internal documents are not accessible we want to check if the reasons are related to their nature of internal documents. We first checked that in the European law system there are some limits of the right to access internal documents, but this fact does not affect Italian laws. Secondly, we looked at the Italian constitution law to see if some principles of this law, like the principles of efficiency and impartiality of the administration, the transparency principle and the right to be informed, are related to the right to access documents held by public authority. With the exception of the efficiency principle all of them clearly entail an enlargement of the right to access. Thirdly, we checked if the legislative powers of the Italian Regions and the regulatory powers of the Municipalities can affect the right to access. We believe that Regions and Municipalities can recognize even the right to access the information held by them. Furthermore, we analyzed the formal definition of internal document and verified on this basis the actual accessibility of various types of internal documents. Some types of documents, like circulars, directives and all regulatory documents, are published on the websites of the public authorities. Every citizen has the right of access to these documents. Other internal documents are accessible only to citizens that have specific interests to know them. Documents classified as secret or confidential, or related to professional privileges are not accessible. Public authorities have the right to not comply with a request for documents if the request would produce a general inspection to them or oblige them to re-elaborate the data contained in the documents. It is concluded that all the exemptions to the right to access documents are not related to their being, or not being, internal. We checked the Spanish laws too, from the constitutional law to the Transparency law (law n. 19 of 2013). In the Transparency law it is recognized the right to access information held by public authorities, but there are also exemptions for some internal documents. In conclusion, it is described the way to improve the current Italian laws on the right to access. For instance a general right of access information held by public authorities could be recognized with the exception of vexatious requests. Moreover, the access request could be denied for documents related to confidential informations or to professional privileges. Finally, with the introduction of an electronic administrative procedure for data registering and management all the data could be easily accessible by computers without compromising the efficiency principle.