Finland has a long tradition of open access to government files. This can be traced to the world’s oldest freedom of information law enacted in 1766, when Finland was part of Sweden. The current law is known as The Act on the Openness of Government Activities (1999) and is considered to provide citizens extensive access to public information. The Act states a principle that all documents are public by default unless there is a specific reason for withholding them, enacted within another law.
There are still no privileges specifically for journalists to access public information; rather, all citizens may access any official public document held by public authorities and private bodies that exercise public authority. Those requesting information are not required to provide reasons or even verify their identity, unless they are requesting personal or otherwise-classified information. There are 32 legally specified categories of secret documents exempt from public release, according to a variety of potential harm tests, depending on the type of information.
In a couple of recent studies, journalists’ experiences of the freedom of information legislation and their perusal of official documents were examined (Hiltunen & Suuronen, 2019; Media Industry Research Foundation of Finland, 2020). As per an “accessibility test” designed to evaluate the behaviour of individual officials towards information requests, it was found that officials were often slow to reply and reluctant to provide the information requested.[i] Problems arose often from inconsistent legal interpretations of what comprised public or non-public issues, from negative attitudes among the authorities providing requested information, and partly from the journalistic practices themselves (see also Indicator E1 – Media ownership concentration national level).
A further problem stems from the fact that journalists do not always seem to be aware of their rights to access information. From the interviews with editors-in-chief and experts, it was also suggested that rather than the legislation alone, the more critical issues have to do with the skills and resources of journalists to find and access relevant information. Additionally, journalists often face problems in gaining information about actions that are still in preparation, which hinders public evaluation of the authorities’ forthcoming plans. However, most respondents acknowledged that the existing law does give journalists and the general public relatively broad access to public information:
We get the information from the political system, it is open – the politicians have an open mind and are reasonably easy to approach and to acquire information from. On the other hand, documents are not always accessible. Sometimes you are denied access to documents that should be openly available. There might be a fee in order to get access. There are of course cases where clerks actually need to make an effort to find the information. It is not clear-cut, things are not working optimally in Finland. There are authorities who seek to keep some documents secret and not follow the “general spirit of the laws” or, even, restrict the reporters to some extent. (HS journalist, 2020)
[i] https://tietopyyntoongelmat.net/
