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Deutsch: Slowakei: Gericht fordert Filterung von Open Data zum öffentlichen Au...

Fair-Play Alliance (AFP), a Slovak non-governmental organization operating znasichdani.sk site, was required by a Bratislava District Court to take down from the website information related to certain public procurement contracts.

The website was created in March 2011 in order to provide "a tool that would enable journalists and watchdogs to cross-check information about companies successful in public procurements with influential persons in these companies".

The basic idea was to connect the information on the Public Procurement bulletin with that in the database of Business register of the Slovak republic "in a way that would match persons with the names of companies in which these persons are or once were active, and with financial volume of the companies' state contracts," stated Eva Vozarova from AFP.

Recently, the District Court of Bratislava II has issued a preliminary injunction, ordering Fair-Play Alliance to withdraw from the website any information related to a particular private individual, the statutory representative of the large construction company Strabag which had won good contracts paid with public money. The decision of the court is that AFP must remove the financial totals of public procurement orders won by Strabag, and all other companies in which this person was involved. This preliminary ruling had no detailed explanation on why this was necessary.

AFP considers the decision of the court inappropriate, unconstitutional and threatens the right to freedom of speech. Moreover, the website only puts together already publicly available data. It contains a register of people known to be behind companies that have benefited from state orders. When searching for a particular person, the site lists the companies to which the name of the respective person is or was related to and the state orders those companies have won, as well as the amounts received from public funds.

The court's decision is also unclear as, normally, it should instruct on how to perform the action required. AFP was supposed to refrain from publishing the persons' name, surname and title from the website znasichdani.sk which could directly connect the claimant's person with the financial value gained from public procurement. The site however makes no connections of financial values to the claimant's name but only filters information showing the results side by side. The total of occurrences of the claimant's name can hardly be technically erased without compromising the rest of the service.

"The alliance has done nothing else but make possible simultaneous searches in two publicly accessible databases," stated lawyer Vladimír Sárnik who added that the preliminary decision of the court contains both formal and factual mistakes.

The court decision was issued even before the plaintiff had submitted her complaint (as the Slovak legal system makes this possible), which could lead to a paradoxical situation when the preliminary decision may remain in place for an indefinite period without a formal complaint being submitted.

Ironically, a few days ahead, on 17 June 2011, the Znasichdani.sk site was awarded first prize at Open Data Challenge, a European competition sponsored by the Open Knowledge Foundation and backed by the European Commission.

AFP has immediately appealed the court's preliminary decision.

Court orders removal of public procurement data (4.07.2011)
http://spectator.sme.sk/articles/view/43180/2/court_orders_removal_of_...

Why censoring Slovak spending app means bad news for open data (18.07.2011)
http://blog.okfn.org/2011/07/18/why-censoring-slovak-spending-app-mean...

Fair-play Watchdog Angered by Court ruling (29.06.2011)
http://www.thedaily.sk/2011/06/29/top-news/fair-play-watchdog-angered-...