The German Parliament (Bundestag) has completed the first reading of a new freedom of information law on 17 December 2004. Germany and Switzerland are the only 2 major Western European member states of the Council of Europe without such a law on accessibility of governmental acts and decision making. Within the EU, only Cyprus, Malta and Luxemburg lack this kind of legislation. The German green-red coalition cabinet promised to send such a proposal to the Lower House immediately after the summer recess.

In a joint press release, the data protection authorities of Schleswig-Holstein, Berlin, Brandenburg and Nordrhein-Westfalen call the proposal 'a step in the right direction', but at the same time say the proposal 'shows the skid marks of numerous compromises'. Documents containing company secrets can only be made available, even if the company

The Council of Europe is working on a new declaration or recommendation on human rights and internet. An ad-hoc committee of experts on the information society has been meeting for the first time in November 2004, and will have a second meeting in Strasbourg on 3 and 4 February 2005. The Council does not provide any information about the proceedings or specific members of the committee, but has recently published the terms of reference. The aim of the committee is to provide "a draft political statement on the principles and guidelines for ensuring respect for freedom of expression and opinion, for human rights and for the rule of law in the Information Society, with a view to its use as a Committee of Ministers' contribution to the Third Summit of Heads of State and Government of the Council of Europe (16-17 May 2005) and the 2005 Tunis

In Bulgaria, proponents of open source and open standards have booked a remarkable legal victory. On 7 December 2004 the Supreme Administrative Court ruled against the minister of state administration, Dimitar Kalchev. Two members of parliament and the foundation 'Access to Information Program' had demanded access to the 2002 agreement between Microsoft and the Bulgarian government on renting 30.000 copies of MS Windows XP and MS Office XP.

A jury of 3 decided to grant access to the document. Government has announced they will appeal the decision, and take it to a 5-member jury. Until then, the document will not be made available.

News item about the verdict (in Bulgarian, 09.12.2004)
http://portal.bg/news.php?cat=main&read=20040912002

(Contribution by Veni Markovski, EDRI-member ISOC Bulgaria)

On 12 November, the German Lower House (Bundestag) debated in plenary on the merits of individual filtering or state-ordered blocking of illegal and harmful content. Germany is the only country in Western Europe (besides Switzerland) were governmental blocking-orders were issued to providers to prevent internet users from accessing information deemed illegal or indecent. Over 80 internet providers in Nordrein-Westfalen were ordered early in 2002 by the district government of Dusseldorf to block access to 4 foreign websites with neo-nazi content. Meanwhile, 2 of the 4 websites have been dropped from the blocking-order, including the distasteful, but certainly not illegal website rotten.com. More recently, the anti-censorship activist Alvar Freude was brought to court by the same regional government of Dusseldorf for posting hyper-links to censored

On 17 September 2004, the experimental free online encyclopaedia Wikipedia reached 1 million (approved) entries. Every internet user can write entries, and suggest improvements for any other entry. This idea has proven extremely viable in the last 4 years. Wikipedia now provides information in 100 languages, 14 of which offer more than 10.000 articles each. With 140.000 articles, Germany is the second biggest contributor to the encyclopaedia after the UK.

To improve co-ordination among all the volunteers, Wikipedia launched a quarterly newsletter in 12 languages. The first edition mentions the initiative to put the German Wikipedia on a CD, and distribute it via the publishing house Directmedia Publishing. The publisher has announced it wants to distribute 30.000 CDs for free to all involved people in Germany, packaged with promotion for the commercial software DigiBib. Under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL) all third parties can reuse Wikipedia articles as long as they pass on that right to others.

The German government is promising to finally implement a freedom of information law, according to an article published in Berliner Zeitung from 3 July 2004. After many years of debate within the red-green coalition, a legal proposal will be sent to parliament (Bundestag) after the summer break. Mrs Stokar, an MP for the Green party, is quoted to say that the project could be finalised before the end of the year 2004. "We wish to expand civil rights. That's why the decisions from the ministries must become accessible."

The German e-zine Heise adds that a freedom of information law was already announced in 1998, in the coalition agreement between the Social Democrat Party (SPD) and the Greens. The project was stalled many times, until the national ministry of internal affairs released a discussion draft in the summer of 2001. The legal proposal was rejected in June 2002, according to the Greens because of ministries led by social democrats.

One of the highlights of the Free Bitflows conference in Vienna, Austria on 3 and 4 June 2004 was a lecture by Brewster Kahle about the Internet Archive. This digital archive aims at no less than offering universal access to all human knowledge, by collecting digital copies of all old and new public domain books, music, films, software and web-sites. A copy is in San Francisco (US) and a partial copy is in Alexandria (Egypt).

Around 300 BC the classic library of Alexandria contained about 75 percent of all documents that were ever made. Today, the internet archive wishes to secure and disclose a similar percentage of all creative works ever made, but with improved protection against destruction. The final goal of the archive is to have a full copy in 5 or 6 countries and jurisdictions, to be able to survive any war or censorship.

On 22 March, the European Union has signed the Council of Europe's Convention on information and legal co-operation concerning 'Information Society Services', without reservation as to ratification.

The aim of this Convention, which was prepared in close co-operation between the Council of Europe and the European Commission, is to improve the exchange of information between all 45 countries in Europe about pending new legislation for the information society. The Council of Europe will act as a clearing-house for draft legislation and provide a harmonised approach to the regulation of on-line services at the pan-European level. Member states of the European Union were already familiar with this obligation, under the 'Transparency' directive (98/48/EC), that allows the Commission to assess draft national