10
LEANDER v. SWEDEN JUGDMENT
Members or former Members of Parliament from different political parties,
including the Opposition - and at least three of them must be present when
the decision is taken.
Information may be released only if all the participating members of the
Board agree on the decision. Where one or more of the lay members of the
Board oppose release of certain information, the National Police
Commissioner may refer the matter to the Government for decision if he
considers that the information should be made available. Such reference to
the Government shall also be made if one of the lay members so requests.
30. When a request for a personnel control is received by the National
Police Board, the practice is the following. The Security Department draws
up a memorandum on the information contained in the relevant registers and
presents this orally to the Board, which, after deliberation, decides whether
the information should be handed out in whole or in part. In taking this
decision, it considers among other things the nature of the post in question,
the degree of reliability of the information and how old the entries are.
When a file contains only a few entries, this is a factor which may militate
against disclosure. There are no written instructions on disclosure apart
from the provisions of the Ordinance and the Instructions of the
Government.
31. At the relevant time, section 13 prescribed that before information
was released by the National Police Board in cases relating to appointment
to posts classified in Security Class 1, the person concerned should be given
an opportunity of presenting his observations in writing or orally, unless
there were special reasons to the contrary. In cases of appointment to posts
classified in Security Class 2, the above notification procedure was to be
applied only if required on account of special circumstances. However, in
no case concerning a Security Class 2 post does the Board ever seem to
have found any special circumstances to be present and, accordingly, such
notification was never made - in spite of the fact that various important
authorities, including the Chancellor of Justice and the Parliamentary
Ombudsman, called upon to comment on the legislative proposal which was
to become the Ordinance had recommended the making of at least some
form of notification.
This provision was amended as from 1 October 1983 (Ordinance
1983:764). At present, before information is released in cases of
appointment to posts in all Security Classes, the person concerned must be
given the opportunity of presenting his observations in writing or orally.
This rule does not, however, apply if the person would thereby come to
know information classified as secret by virtue of any provision in the
Secrecy Act 1980, except for section 17 in Chapter 7 of the Act (see
paragraph 41 below), or if the requesting authority, in cases not concerned
with appointment to official posts, has been exempted by the Government