Tuesday's HD ruling means in brief that public documents from courts containing personal data – such as judgments 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like Lexbase, Verifiera, and Acta Publica will not receive more judgments and that the databases will quickly become outdated.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 information. It will also make it extremely difficult for journalists and people who want to work on crime prevention, says Gunnar Axén.
Girls check their dates
Lexbase is mainly used by private individuals and small business owners and has over 700,000 verified users, according to Axén.
It can be entrepreneurs who want to check who they do business with, or people who want to check up on the craftsman they let into their house. I also know that many girls check their dates on Lexbase, he says.
Verifiera targets larger companies and authorities and has a thousand customers, including municipalities and state authorities.
The Swedish Courts Administration uses our services and provides them to all our courts.
Background checks
According to Gunnar Axén, the ruling means that it will in practice be impossible to perform simpler background checks. He highlights, among other things, how difficult it can become for companies that, according to the Money Laundering Act, are required to have good customer knowledge:
The whole purpose of the Money Laundering Act, where private companies are supposed to act preventively, is being thwarted.
The service industry's employer and industry 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 again have the opportunity to protect themselves against infiltration from organized crime", says Rebecca Henriques, labor law lawyer at Almega, in a comment.
