Half the Battle Won in the “Nuclear” Lawsuit

The Court of Appeals sent the case back to the Metropolitan Court because the court of first instance was wrong in defining the expert opinions regarding the re-start of the Paks Nuclear Power Plant’s 2nd block were not public data. The Court of Appeals ruled that indeed they were public data, but it was possible that they were to be considered as trade secrets or fell under copyright laws. This however needed to be decided by the court of first instance in a re-trial.

In several important questions the Court of Appeals agreed with the NGOs. In its decision it agreed that the litigation needed to be made against the Nuclear Safety Directorate of the National Nuclear Energy Agency. It also said that the Directorate’s arguments – that in case of repeated requests for data, deadlines needed to be counted from the date of the previous requests- were wrong. According to the Court of Appeals the only decisive factor was that the litigation be started within 30 days of the answer rejecting the submission of data. It doesn’t matter how many times this rejection was filed.

The most important decision of the proceeding was that the data required by the plaintiff are considered as public data and do not belong to the category of decision-preparation data. This means that the automatic restriction of publicity does not pertain to these data. The court ruled that according to the Aarhus Convention the public has an increasing interest in getting access to these data.

 

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