As of January 27, 2026, and despite the growing public relevance of the migration debate and the extraordinary regularization of immigrants promoted by the Government with the explicit support of sectors of the Church, ACCEM continues without responding to an elementary question of transparency: who makes up its General Assembly, the supreme governing body of the entity.
Infovaticana formally raised this issue on September 5, 2025, through an email addressed to the organization, requesting general information—not protected or personal—about the composition of the Assembly, the number of members with voting rights, and the type of assembly members, natural or legal persons. Proper names or sensitive data were not requested, but a basic snapshot of the internal power structure of an NGO that manages figures akin to those of a large public company. To this day, that email remains unanswered.
This is not an isolated incident. We are aware that several Infovaticana readers, following the publication of the first article on ACCEM, have made similar inquiries to the organization, both through formal and informal channels. The result has been the same: absolute silence. No clarification, no statement, no public reference that allows one to know how the leadership of an entity that, according to its own 2024 Report, handled provisional income exceeding 225 million euros, with more than 88% coming from the General State Administration, is internally legitimized.
This fact is neither minor nor accessory. ACCEM is today one of the main operators of the public system for welcoming immigrants and asylum seekers in Spain. It has thousands of employees, thousands of reception places, and tens of thousands of annual beneficiaries. Its real weight in the material execution of migration policy is indisputable. In practice, it acts as a structural piece of the current migration model, financed almost entirely with public money.
In this context, the opacity regarding its General Assembly is particularly serious. ACCEM’s Board of Directors is known and appears in organizational charts and reports. Its president, Pilar Samanes Ara, and other prominent positions have public profiles linked to the ecclesiastical sphere. None of this is illegal or hidden. What remains in the shadows is the body that elects that Board, sets strategic lines, and, ultimately, legitimizes the decisions that affect hundreds of millions of euros in public funds.
The absence of information cannot be justified by data protection reasons. Knowing whether the Assembly is made up of a few people or a broad collective, whether it is renewed periodically or remains closed for years, or whether it is composed of individuals or entities, is a basic issue of governance. It is also a minimum standard of transparency required of any organization that depends so overwhelmingly on public funding.
This lack of clarity takes on even greater relevance in the current political and ecclesiastical climate. The massive regularization of immigrants promoted by the Government converges with a discourse sustained by the Spanish Episcopal Conference and its affiliated entities, oriented toward welcome and integration, with little emphasis on structural limits or the social effects of these policies. ACCEM, with recognized ecclesiastical roots, is positioned at the exact point where that moral discourse becomes practical execution through contracts, subsidies, and programs financed by the State.
This is not about making an accusation or questioning the legality of ACCEM’s activity, but about pointing out an evident institutional incoherence. In a democratic system, the management of public money requires not only accounting audits, but also transparency about who makes the decisions and under what internal legitimacy. When the supreme body of an entity that handles more than 200 million euros annually remains invisible, the question ceases to be ideological and becomes strictly democratic.
ACCEM’s prolonged silence does not dispel doubts; it aggravates them. As long as it is not clarified who makes up its General Assembly and how internal control is exercised, a fundamental question will remain open for society as a whole: if the money is public and the social consequences are collective, why does the internal power of one of the pillars of the migration model remain outside public scrutiny?