A newly passed government secrecy law in Honduras threatens the efficacy of the country’s freedom-of-information legislation, the International Press Institute (IPI) said today.

The Official Secrets Law was passed on Jan. 13 , though it is now Opens external link in new windowsuspended pending further study. Under its current terms, all government bodies would have the power to classify material as ‘restricted’ — the lowest of four levels of secrecy — if revealing it could cause “undesired institutional effects.”

This vague formulation, IPI finds, conflicts with the stated goals of Honduras’s 2006 Law on Transparency and Access to Public Information. These include promoting the efficient use of resources, combating corruption, and ensuring transparency in state relations with private individuals.

“Regardless of how this clause was intended,” IPI Press Freedom Manager Barbara Trionfi said, “it clearly opens the door for government agencies to hide evidence of embarrassing or potentially unlawful activity from the press and, therefore, the public. Unfortunately, it is just one of many ill-defined provisions that could seriously undermine the principle of democratic accountability. We urge the government to reconsider this legislation.”

Under the new law, which has reportedly been suspending pending further study, Honduras’s National Security and Defence Council to classify as “secret” any information that could cause “serious internal and external damage” to national security, defence, or the undefined “attainment of national objectives.” In cases when the potential damage is judged to be “extremely serious,” the President may declare such information “ultra-secret”, the highest level.

‘Restricted’ information can be declassified after five years; ‘confidential, ‘secret’ and ‘ultra-secret’ information only after 10, 15 and 25, respectively.

Where the Law on Transparency preaches the public’s right to hold government actors accountable, the Official Secrets Law establishes hurdles to it. For example, while Article 7 of the Official Secrets Law states that citizens can request that certain material be declassified in the name of (“well-founded”) public interest, the decision to do so lies with the government entity that classified it in the first place.

Article 13 warns those with access to classified information that revealing its contents would lead to “criminal, civil and administrative” punishments. It does not provide for a public-interest or whistleblower exception.

Doris Imelda Madrid, director of the Institute on Access to Public Information (IAIP), the independent body responsible for overseeing compliance with the Transparency Law, called the Official Secrets Law “clearly unconstitutional,” according to news reports. “It diminishes and distorts IAIP’s work and prevents citizens from having access to public information.”

IAIP is not mentioned in the Official Secrets Law and it is not clear that the body would have any ability to influence government decisions on classified material.

The Committee on Free Expression (C-Libre), a Honduran NGO, said the law “violates citizens’ rights to access to information and constitutes an attack on the transparency that should prevail in public administration.”

Trionfi added: “Given that 27 journalists have been murdered in Honduras over the past five years, we are surprised that the Honduran Congress is spending its time writing a law to further restrict the press’s ability to do its job. Preventing continued violence against journalists and fighting impunity for those who commit it should be among its very highest priorities.”

As IPI reported last year, measures promised in August 2012 by then-President Porfirio Lobo Sosa to combat the country’s journalist-safety crisis have not materialised. These would have included the creation of a special investigative body dedicated to preventing impunity for crimes against the media as well as new legal procedures to handle such crimes.

In its 2013 Corruption Perceptions Index, Transparency International ranked Honduras the fourth most-corrupt country in the Western Hemisphere, behind Paraguay, Venezuela, and Haiti.