Path: netnews.worldnet.att.net!arclight.uoregon.edu!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!psgrain!solace!mn6.swip.net!mn5.swip.net!news From: Zenon Panoussis Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology Subject: Friday the 13th is a bad day! Date: Fri, 13 Sep 1996 11:55:59 +0200 Organization: - Lines: 50 Message-ID: <32392FAF.E4E@dodo.pp.se> Reply-To: oracle@dodo.pp.se NNTP-Posting-Host: dialup98-1-13.swipnet.se Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit NNTP-Posting-User: s-40153 X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0b7 (Win16; I) CC: hkk@netcom.com, dm@dma.se, oracle@dodo.pp.se CC: Kobrin & Magnusson The question is, bad for whom? Just a few minutes ago the court of appeals in Stockholm dismissed the RTC's motion of secrecy of the OTs and NOTs. The motion was not denied; it was just dismissed. In its motives the court states that according to the law on secrecy, the authority that receives a request for copies of a public document has to judge whether the request can be met or not from a secrecy viewpoint. If the authority decides that no secrecy applies, the copy is delivered and that decision cannot be appealed against. (If the authority on the contrary decides that secrecy applies and that a request of copies cannot be honoured, that decision can be appealed against by the person that requested the document. Parties in such an appeal case are the authority that refused to provide the copy and the person that requested it, but not the person that is concerned by the document, in this case the RTC). The court of appeals concluded that there is no legal possibility to make a general decision on secrecy aiming at future requests of copies and that the RTC's motion is thus unfounded. Formally this means that the primary court that has the documents in its file has to decide for every request whether to hand out the document or not. But it is worth keeping in mind that the primary court, in its decisions that were appealed against by the RTC, already stated that the OTs and NOTs should not be secret. Although that statement is not formally binding the court in its future decisions, it indicates the view of the court on the matter and could be used against the court itself, should the court change its view. In short: the OTs and NOTs are still public documents and will most probably remain so forever. You are the first ones to know this, before the newspapers or anybody else. Tonight, wherever you are, raise a toast for judges Lars-Göran Åsbring, Birgitta Widebäck and Gustaf Lagerbjelke, as well as to Malin Bonthron that referred the case. Z