/ Government requests urgent processing of the data privacy bill
January 15, 2021On January 5, 2021, the urgency that the Ministry of Finance gave to the Bill governing data privacy was renewed. The bill regulates all processing of private data carried out by an individual or legal entity, in order to protect the right to privacy of Chileans.
Recently, the government expressed its intention to accelerate the processing of the data privacy n bill (bulletin 11144-07), which has been in the Senate Finance Committee since March 2020 after having been dispatched from the Constitution, Legislation, Justice, and Regulations Committee of the same Chamber, ratifying the Council for Transparency as the authority on the matter.
The executive branch, motivated by the events occurred by the request of information from the Ministry of Finance to the AFP Superintendence regarding the applicants of the 10% withdrawal, submitted on December 15th , 2020 a message to the Senate in which it expressed an urgency qualified as “suma”.
As per the constitutional organic law of the National Congress, the bill must be known and dispatched within a period of fifteen days since the message was given. However, on January 5th , 2021, the urgency was renewed for another fifteen days.
In spite of being a tool of the President to impose deadlines for debate and pronouncement in the processing of bills, there is no sanction for non-compliance and, in practice, it is usually the members of the commissions themselves who decide the priority of the matters that are of their knowledge.
This does not mean that urgency is a useless tool since it acquires relevance as a motor for presidential intervention in the Congress legislative agenda. Especially in a matter as sensitive and pressing as the modernization of the legislation governing data privacy. Both the public and private sectors should be on the lookout for the progress of this bill, which is announced as part of the Government priority legislative agenda for 2021.