Information Freedom wins in Gripen-case

Following today’s first instance decision of the Capital Court, the Ministry of Economy and Transport is ordered to make public their list of fulfilments approved until 11.09.2008 by the Offset Committee with regard to the Gripen fighter-jets. The Court emphasized, that since public funds - which are of public interest - are involved, the fact that contracting partners are citing business secrets is, by itsself not enough to withhold the information from the public.

Premise:

HCLU’s Legal-aid Service took on representation of Zsófia Gergely, journalist of origo.hu in the lawsuit she initiated against the Ministry of Economy and Transport.
The journalist wanted to find out what compananies’ fulfilments were approved by the Ministry of Economy and Transport with regard to the offsets of the Gripen-acquisition worth approximately 200 billion forints.

Since the Ministry withheld this information, the journalist had to turn to the Court, which ruled that the data has to be made public.

 

Share

Related articles

The state, too, can access my phone records?

In its judgement, the Court of Justice of the European Union has declared the Data Retention Directive invalid. Based on the Directive, service providers were keeping phone records and other personal data for 6 months. We have decided to undertake the lengthy process of actually eliminating this European law in Hungary.

Read more »

Profit-making through FOI?

A draft bill on the re-use of public sector information submitted to the Hungarian Parliament by the government would make the national FOI legislation highly unpredictable - according to the HCLU and K-Monitor, major Hungarian NGOs working for transparency and freedom of information. The proposal intends to harmonize Hungarian freedom of information legislation with the EU law by implementing the 2003/98/EC Directive on the re-use of public sector information. The latter is to be revised soon, due to a proposal of the European Commission. The HCLU and K-Monitor ask legislative authorities to withdraw their draft proposal due to the following reasons.

Read more »

Whistleblower Protection in Central and Eastern Europe

K-Monitor Association and the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union organized a project on Legal Regulation of Public Interest Disclosures in Post-Soviet Democracies. The two Hungarian NGOs created a virtual conference on whistleblowing protection with an interactive discussion surface in English as well as an online content in form of this website. For the implementation of the “virtual conference”, K-Monitor and HCLU also invited NGOs working in the field of anti-corruption from Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Poland, Moldova and Hungary to take part in the project.

Read more »