There is no excuse for the Community of Madrid not to respect a resolution of the defunct Transparency Council of 2022 which required that the reports of inspections carried out by the Municipal Police in residences in the region during the worst phase of the pandemic be handed over to a former PSOE deputy without identifying them. This is made explicit in a ruling from the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid (TSJM), which the government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso turned to in 2023 to prevent direct testimonies from coming to light of some tragic days in which thousands of residents died without receiving hospital care. Before justice forced Madrid with this ruling to hand over the minutes signed between March 1 and August 1, 2020 and imposed the payment of costs, Cadena Ser y Más Madrid made them public in 2024, after having obtained them through its sources. Despite trying to prevent the documents from being published in court, the government assures that it has been allowing access to them for some time, even as the now resolved dispute continues in court.
The officers of the Municipal Police of Madrid, as announced in 2024 by chain of Beinghe wrote more than 200 reports on the situation of the capital’s residences in the first months of the pandemic. In the minutes documenting that drama it is clear that the bodies were not collected due to lack of resources and the physical and emotional exhaustion of the workers due to the “lack of institutional support” from the Community of Madrid.
A tragedy that remains in the political spotlight and that the courts are still trying to clarify: dozens of courts are investigating what happened. This year, eight have accused former managers of the crisis: the former director general of socio-health coordination, Carlos Mur, signatory of the triage protocols that decided which patients were or were not admitted to hospitals; the geriatrician who inherited that position and who helped Mur draw up those documents, Javier Martínez Peromingo; Pablo Busca, the former ambulance manager of Summa 112; and Antonio Burgueño, former Ayuso councilor.
“We have just received the ruling and the legal services are studying it,” says a government spokesperson. “The Community of Madrid has allowed anyone who has requested it through the Security and Emergency Agency 112 of Madrid (ASEM112) to consult the minutes once they have been made anonymous, protecting the personal data they contain.”
Once the contents of the documents are known, the ruling is of paramount importance to put an end to the regional government’s vetoes in the application of the transparency law and to explain the changes that the Regional Executive has made to its application since Díaz Ayuso obtained the absolute majority in 2023.
Thus, the eighth section of the contentious-administrative section of the TSJM categorically rejects that the Administration, in this case, can hide in not giving an answer because the documentation is very voluminous, in the obligation of anonymization so that the identity of the workers and residents is not known, or in the need to reprocess the data. The same opinion was also expressed by the Regional Council for Transparency and Participation, which accepted the request of this citizen who had been denied access to information by the Ministry of the Interior at first instance. At that time, the Community had two options: rectify and provide the information, or defend its position in court. He chose the latter. And he lost.
“We do not reject the appeal presented by the representation of the Community of Madrid,” reads the sentence, accepted by EL PAÍS. “All this with costs borne by the plaintiff.”
In any case, the Council’s decision in favor of the applicant which gave rise to the judicial proceedings, like other precedents contrary to the interests of the Díaz Ayuso Government, is predictably at the origin of the autonomous Executive’s decision to modify it to bind it.
Thus, in Madrid we went from a completely independent Transparency Council, attached to the Madrid Assembly (where all the parties negotiated the names of its three members), to another linked to the Executive (which appoints its president and sole member).
The effects of this change are statistically measurable. In January 2025, the new Council for Transparency and Data Protection took off with the legacy of two unresolved complaints since 2022, 153 since 2023 and 180 registered between January and May 2024. All the extremes that the previous body had left unresolved, whose members have always regretted the lack of means, represented the enormous traffic jam that the citizens of Madrid face when they are not agree with the answers given to them. The Administration responds to their requests for information protected by law and they turn to this institution to decide who is right.
The PSOE brought before the Constitutional Court the law that allowed the regional government to “muzzle” transparency in the region, as well as also controlling the Chamber of Accounts, or Telemadrid, without the High Court having yet ruled on the issue.
