Tuesday's Supreme Court ruling means in brief that public documents from courts containing personal data – such as verdicts in criminal cases – will not be disclosed if the purpose is to spread them in databases available to paying customers.
This means that services like Lexbase, Verifiera, and Acta Publica will not receive more verdicts, and their databases will quickly become outdated.
From now on, those who want to find out if someone has been convicted will have to contact the courts themselves.
This is an incredible restriction on freedom of speech and the principle of public access to official documents. It will also make it extremely difficult for journalists and people who want to work on crime prevention, says Gunnar Axén.
"Attacking journalism"
When the news agency Siren writes a news article, they send the source material in the form of a public document. These documents have also been made available for journalistic research in the archive service Acta Publica. Now, they cannot share the criminal verdicts, explains Siren's editor-in-chief Ulf Fahlén.
Although the Supreme Court's ruling so far only concerns criminal verdicts from the Court of Appeal for Upper Norrland, Siren assumes that most courts will follow the decision.
This is a ruling that attacks journalism, and the consequence is that it will become harder to conduct serious investigations of verdicts, of the judicial system, of the courts themselves, for that matter, says Fahlén.
Girls check dates
Lexbase is mainly used by private individuals and small business owners and has over 700,000 verified users, according to Gunnar Axén.
It can be entrepreneurs who want to check who they do business with, or people who want to check up on the handyman they let into their house. I also know that many girls check their dates on Lexbase, says he.
Verifiera targets larger companies and authorities and has a thousand customers, including municipalities and government agencies.
The Court Administration uses our services and provides them to all our courts.
Background checks
According to Gunnar Axén, the ruling means that it will be practically impossible to perform simple background checks. He highlights, among other things, how difficult it can become for companies, which according to the Money Laundering Act are required to have good customer knowledge.
The service industry's employer and trade organization Almega also expresses concern that the databases will not be able to be used for background checks during recruitments.
"Now the government must act swiftly to ensure that employers are once again able to protect themselves against infiltration from organized crime", says Rebecca Henriques, labor law lawyer at Almega, in a comment.
