Court of Justice confirms Poland failed to implement the PSI Directive. Meanwhile new law proposed.

The Court of Justice of the EU confirmed that Poland failed to transpose the PSI Directive correctly. (Decision in French)

The Court agreed with the Commission in regards of all grievances. In particular, the Court stated that persons who would like to re-use PSI should know in which circumstances they can rely on respect of conditions of re-use established by the PSI Directive.

According to the Court a national regulation on access to documents is not, by itself, susceptible of transposing the provisions of the Directive with the clarity necessary to satisfy the requirements of legal security and enabling persons who would like to re-use public documents to know all their rights.

The Court also stated that a fact that a certain activity is not exercised in a Member State does not dispense that Member State from transposing all the provision of a directive. Such obligation lies on all Members States in order to prevent any possible modifications and to guarantee that everyone in the EU, also in those Member States who don't exercise certain activities, know with clarity and precision and in all circumstances the full scope of their rights and obligations.

The European Commission brought action against the Republic of Poland on 20 July 2010".

Since then the government of Poland has send a bill to Parliament amending the law on access to public sector information in July, and the Polish Prime Minister announced a 'public by default' policy last May.

The new amendment contains provisions like:

• Presumption of non-restricted re-use of PSI
• General rule of free re-use for all purposes
• Limited reasons for rejection of access
• Rejections are administrative decisions, subject to appeal in court
• Open license for copyrighted PSI
• PSI that is digitally available needs to (also) be in machine readable formats

These points were also presented by Polish government representatives at the recent Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw.

Also see our report on PSI re-use in Poland from early 2011.