Freedom of Information: A Comparative Legal Survey - Federation of ...

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where this “presents serious diffi culty” or where the applicant can be provided access, without serious
inconvenience, at a public body “located in the vicinity” (Articles 12-13). The document may also be copied or
otherwise reproduced for a fi xed fee, although public bodies are not obliged to make electronic documents
available other than via a print out.
Inspection of a document shall be provided free of charge. Central statutory rates apply to the provisions
of copies of documents exceeding nine pages. 265
A particular feature of the Swedish right to information system, set out in Chapter 15 of the Secrecy Act,
1981, is the requirement for all public bodies to register all documents they have received or drawn up.
There are four exceptions to this rule:
documents which are obviously of little importance, such as press cuttings;
documents which are not secret and which are kept in a manner which makes it easy to ascertain
whether they have been received or drawn up by a public body;
documents found in large numbers which have been exempted; and
electronic records kept in a central registry. 266
The register must record the date the document was received or drawn up, a registration number or other
identifying designation, who the document was received from or dispatched to, where relevant, and a brief
description of the document. In general, information in the register is itself open for public inspection,
although in exceptional cases certain information in the register itself, as an offi cial document, might be
covered by a secrecy provision.
Duty to Publish
A very signifi cant lacunae in the Swedish RTI Law is that it does not include any particular obligation of
proactive publication. In practice, most Swedish public bodies do provide a wealth of information on a
proactive basis, particularly via their websites.
Furthermore, provisions in various other laws and rules place certain proactive publication obligations on
public bodies. The government must publish all laws and the various State authorities entrusted with the
power to adopt regulations are also obliged to publish these. Material that forms the basis of legislation,
such as government committee proposals, is published in a particular series produced by the government
at the start of public consultation on the legislation, before the government makes its proposals to
parliament.
Agreements between Sweden and other States or international organisations are published in a special
series, produced by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. “Post- och Inrikes Tidningar” (PoIT) is an offi cial
publication for disseminating announcements from public bodies and others that are obliged by law to
publish information. It contains, among other things, information about shareholding companies and
other associations, notices to attend shareholders’ meetings, divisions of joint property between spouses,
notices to creditors and adjudications of bankruptcy. PoIT, nowadays published exclusively on the Internet,
is claimed to be the world’s oldest surviving newspaper, founded in 1645.
Exceptions
The exceptions are provided for in Article 2 of Chapter 2 of the Law although, as noted above, the defi nition
of whether a document is offi cial also serves to limit access. The Swedish Law has a rather unique