Swedish authorities will continue to release data on EU farm subsidies in spite of the ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to ban such disclosure on the Internet. The Courts ruling does not affect our law on access to information, says Swedish official.

The ruling by the ECJ on November 9 to halt disclosure of who gets farm subsidies from the EU, has had an immediate impact in Sweden as well as in other EU member states.

Jordbruksverket (the Swedish Board of Agriculture) closed a search tool for recipients of EU-subsidies on its web site. This tool was an implementation of the EU-regulation now ruled by the European Court to be partially ”invalid”.

But a closed down search tool does not signal an overall end for disclosure of the underlying data.

Pernilla Granath Limstrand, a legal expert at the Board of Agriculture, which is responsible for paying out subsidies to Swedish farmers, sets out the official position:

»As a Swedish authority we follow the principle of public access. This implies that we give access to public documents, which are not subject to confidentiality. Decisions by authorities are in general regarded as public, for example decisions of how much subsidy a single recipient is entitled to. Requests of information of subsidy recipients will therefore be met with a release of the requested data.«

A similar message can be read in brief on the home page of Jordbruksverket . Here it says in translation from Swedish:

”It will still be possible to get access to data on subsidies paid to single recipients, but you will have to contact the Board to get this information”.

The Swedish magazine Lantbruk & Skogsland (Farms & Forests) has already done this.

The magazine asked for, and then published  the names and numbers of the 38 top recipients, all of whom got more than 2 million Swedish kronor (219 000 €) in the Single Payment Scheme (SPS).

The SPS is the largest chunk of the various EU subsidies available to farmers.

This disclosure was done on December 1, the very same day as the SPS-subsidies for this year was handed out, and after the ruling of the ECJ.

The biggest impact of the European Court ruling in Sweden so far has been a transfer of work from interested journalists or citizens to civil servants of the Board for Agriculture.

The searches for recipients must now be conducted by personnel at the authority instead of appearing in a semi automatic way at web site of the Board.

»But we haven’t really noticed any increase in demand of this service,« says press officer Ingela Grahn.

The search tools now being blocked at official web sites in EU member states, are still to be found at the Farmsubsidy.org site which collects and organises available data on subsidies from all member states.

Access to documents in Sweden is a sensitive issue as this is regarded as a fundamental right for citizens and has been written into the constitution since 1766.

When Sweden joined the European Union in 1995 the government declared the right of access to documents be a ”fundamental part of Sweden’s constitutional, political and cultural heritage.” The EU replied that the member states had taken notice of this declaration, but added a presumption that Sweden as an EU member would follow the common rules.

Staffan Dahllöf