What happened
The authority expressed serious criticism of a law firm's handling of an access request under Article 15(3), and ordered it to decide whether the conditions for handing over a copy were met and to tell the requester whether the copy was granted or refused. The firm had answered the Article 15(1) information within a fortnight but declined the copy outright, on the view that disclosure at that point could hinder an investigation it was carrying out for a public authority, and because the material also concerned third parties; it later put the material to the person at an interview and let them comment on it without giving them a copy. The authority held that the national exemption turns on decisive regard for private or public interests, that the weighing is done for each item of information separately, so that where such regard reaches only part of the material the rest must still be disclosed, and that there is no power to exempt a whole kind of processing from the right of access. It found the firm had not sufficiently shown why a partial copy could not be given.
What changes at the desk
Other people's data inside a document is a reason to redact that document and not a reason to hold the file back. Work item by item, release everything the exemption does not reach, and put the refusal of the rest in writing with the ground it rests on. Reading somebody their own data across a table is not giving them a copy, and a pause while an investigation runs is a reason to revisit the request when the investigation ends rather than a reason never to answer it.
Primary source
DecisionDenmark29 Nov 2022
This entry is a draft. No practitioner has reviewed it, and it should be read against the document it names rather than relied on as advice.