The law that regulates state secrets was passed yesterday at the Legislative Assembly (AL) in its first reading.
Although several lawmakers questioned the “simplicity” of the bill that aims to be complimentary to the National Security Law, the Secretary for Administration and Justice, André Cheong, said that it is simple enough to keep state secrets well sealed.
One of the more debated topics was how the government will ensure the balance between what is secret and what is public information the public should have access to, which was addressed by lawmakers José Pereira Coutinho and Ron Lam in several interventions.
Cheong noted that “the importance of the law is not defined by the number of definitions it contains,” and rejected the idea of having a commission inspecting the matter, proposed by Pereira Coutinho. As Cheong said, “this would be just disclosing the sensitive information or intel to more people, which is contrary to the spirit of the law.”
In response to Lam, Cheong also said that the law was not too broad, and that public services could only propose documents for classification; the last word on the matter would come from the Chief Executive, who would evaluate the need for classification.
In a different reply to Pereira Coutinho, the Secretary also revealed that there will be no different levels of confidentiality for documents, but rather, the classification as “State Secret” would be just a yes or no matter.
“There are no levels or degrees for the State Secret. It’s either secret or not secret. There will be no documents with different types of classification,” Cheong said. Further, he explained that there will be no doubts for those handling those documents [as to whether they are secret or not] as they will be clearly identified and stamped accordingly.”
The Secretary also explained in a general manner the public entities and services that will produce these documents before sending them to classification, noting that there is also a legal sanction for those civil servants failing to comply with the secrecy of the information they are handling.
