TV-3 program Nekā personīga: Ministries unjustifiably classified documents about the hockey championship, educational conference, and Latvian language courses!
The TV-3 program Nekā personīga dedicated its Sunday segment to the issue of unjustified classification of government documents.
In public administration, there are various levels of secrecy for information and documents. One of them is the restricted access status. This means that the public, including journalists, cannot freely obtain and read these documents. This is supposed to protect confidential information, such as trade secrets, security issues, or personal data. However, a study by the State Chancellery shows that thousands of materials are classified in this way. And the ministries have gone too far in protecting information from the public.
State institutions have assigned restricted access status to thousands of documents. Some of them have been classified for several decades. The justification for this is often vague and unclear.
The State Chancellery looked into how widespread the restricted access status is in the ministries. The numbers are impressive. The most such materials are in the Ministry of Defense with 472. Next is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with 372. Following them are the Ministry of Communications with 179, the Ministry of Economics with 176, the Ministry of the Interior with 171, and the Ministry of Finance with 160. The Ministry of Justice has 97.
When these documents are finally declassified, it often turns out that there is nothing in them that the public should not know.
For years, a document was kept in which the government simply explains its position regarding the World Hockey Championship. And why in 2021 Latvia would not want to host it together with Belarus.
