New EU ‘Trade Secrets Protection’ vote is direct threat to public interest and democracy
Panama Papers show need to safeguard press freedoms from proposed EU legislation
Mossack Fonseca, the Panama-based law
firm at the centre of the Panama Papers scandal, has responded to media
enquiries with a warning :
”It appears that you have had unauthorized access to proprietary
documents and information taken from our company and have presented and
interpreted them out of context. We trust that you are fully aware that
using information/documentation unlawfully obtained is a crime, and we
will not hesitate to pursue all available criminal and civil remedies.”
(1)
The ”Trade Secrets Protection” Directive due to be voted on by MEPs
on April 14 would give such companies new legal ammunition to prosecute
journalists and news organisations publishing their internal documents
and information.
This text (2) creates excessive rights to secrecy for businesses and
is a direct threat to the work of journalists and their sources,
whistleblowers, workers’ freedom of expression, and rights to access
public interest information (on medicines, pesticides, car emissions,
etc).
A pan-european coalition of NGOs, trade unions, journalists,
whistleblowers and researchers (see list below) are calling on (3) MEPs
to reject the text and tell the European Commission to propose a better
one. The coalition has also launched a petition against the text which
has already collected over 72,000 signatures.(4)
The definition of trade secrets the directive foresees is so broad
that almost all internal information within a company can be considered a
trade secret. It will put anybody revealing such information without
the company’s consent at risk.
Martin Pigeon from Corporate Europe Observatory:
“The Trade Secrets Protection Directive set to be voted
in Strasbourg next week is meant to fight industrial espionage but will
apply to everyone in society, including people who have no commercial
interest whatsoever in disclosure and are taking risks in the public
interest. We’re looking here at a new blanket right to corporate
secrecy, and this is the result of outrageous levels of industry
influence on the text from the very beginning. We urge the European
Parliament to reject the text and tell the European Commission to
propose a better one, protecting trade secrets without endangering
citizens’ political rights.”
If the directive is approved at the European level, member states
will be able to go further when they adapt it into national law – and
will face pressure from industry to do so.
Patrick Kamenka, from the European Federation of Journalists’ Steering Committee:
“Citizens, journalists, scientists… sometimes also need
to have access to and publish this information to defend the public
interest. They could now face legal threats, years in prison and heavy
fines worth hundreds of thousands of euros for doing so, like Antoine
Deltour and Edouard Perrin in the Luxleaks affair. This effectively
prevents people from reporting corporate misconduct or wrongdoing. Which
media editor can afford to take the risk of financial ruin?”
