Publicity Act The Prime Minister’s Office keeps data in the government archives out of the public domain, legal scholars knock out the practice – “You can’t start creating archives at will”

Government The Chancellery (VNK) stores written material arising from government work in an archive, which it interprets as falling outside the Public Access to Information Act. Due to VNK’s interpretation, for example, journalists do not receive information on matters archived in this way.

Two experienced professors of law knock out VNK’s proceedings as illegal.

Professor Emeritus Olli Mäenpää and Professor of Public Law Tomi Voutilainen consider that if documents need to be filed, they are automatically also covered by the Public Access to Information Act. This does not mean that all documents are public, but they can then be kept secret only on the basis of their content and for the reasons mentioned in the Public Access Act.

“The Government Archives has been established under the Archives Act. According to the Public Access to Information Act, the archive cannot be outside the Public Access to Information Act. Documents that are attached to the archives according to the Public Access to Information Act cannot be internal official reports, ”says Olli Mäenpää, Professor Emeritus of the Administrative Court.

VNK’s practice has been in place before the current Public Access to Information Act, which came into force in 1999. According to the Public Access to Information Act, government documents are public, unless they are specifically required to be secret.

Government the archive is prescribed by an order issued by the VNK. According to the order, “documents created or received in the performance of the duties of ministers, their special assistants and secretaries of state, such as e-mail correspondence, which are not part of the authority’s documents, as well as documents of government ministerial working groups, evening school and government deliberations” will be transferred to the government archives.

According to Mäenpää, these are preparatory material in nature, which should become public at the latest when the processing ends. He considers it a wild idea that, according to the order, all the policies and strategies mentioned in the order should be confidential preparatory material.

Tomi Voutilainen, Professor of Public Law at the University of Eastern Finland Picture: Roni Rekomaa / Lehtikuva

Tomi Voutilainen, Professor of Public Law at the University of Eastern Finland, follows the same lines. He says that when the archiving of government documents is based on a decision made by the National Archives under the Archives Act, they are covered by the Public Access to Information Act.

VNK interprets it differently than professors.

“From the point of view of the Public Access Act, government documents are documents prepared for the internal work of the authorities, which are not subject to the Public Access Act and which do not need to be attached to the authority’s archives,” Anne Niemi Write to VTK by e-mail from VNK’s data management unit.

According to Niemi, information from the government archives may be made available to researchers at their discretion.

VNK therefore considers the government’s archives and official archives, in which the materials considered to be official documents of VNK and other ministries, are archived to be different matters. Voutilainen finds this problematic because it is not provided for by law.

“You can’t start creating archives to your liking,” says Voutilainen.

However, Professor Emeritus Mäenpää considers it quite good that the key documents of the government have been ordered to be archived, but it cannot be kept secret for the next 25 years.

VNK: n interpretations of public law have also been on the agenda in the past. Last week, BTI reported that the Helsinki Administrative Court overturned VNK’s reasons for concealing the documents of the Corona Coordination Group in the spring of 2020.

Read more: The decision of the Prime Minister’s Office to conceal the documents of the Corona Coordination Group violated the law

Last spring, VNK, for its part, concealed the preparatory documents for the restrictions on movement that were being prepared.

Also read: The reasons for the restrictions on movement remain hidden from the public – Professor Olli Mäenpää overturns the decision to encrypt the Prime Minister’s Office

Also read: One email from Chancellor of Justice Pöyst sent restrictions on movement with an empty message field and an appendix to the draft law from the Marin staff – Prime Minister’s Office secretly