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I recently submitted a public information request to the Ministry of Justice and the South-Central Interregional Directorate for the Enforcement of Criminal Sentences. The request concerned statistical and criminological data on the operations of the Odesa Detention Center. It did not touch on any private individuals or personal data. The information sought is entirely public in nature — indeed, it is precisely the kind that public authorities are obliged to disclose proactively, by default, without waiting to be asked.
Yesterday I received a response.
The refusal was not grounded in secrecy, confidentiality, or state secrets. None of that. The stated reason is that there is simply too much information to collect.
I want to pause on that phrase.
“Too much to collect” is not a legal basis. It is an administrative reflex dressed in bureaucratic language. But what makes this response genuinely interesting is not the refusal itself — it is what the author chose to cite in support of it: a judgment of the European Court of Human Rights. A judgment devoted to freedom of expression and access to information — the very right this response is curtailing.
I cannot say whether the signatory has read that judgment. I have. And that is why I would like to offer a brief legal analysis — not in a polemical spirit, but in the spirit of legal literacy. The Convention for the Protection of Human Rights is part of Ukraine’s legal order, and the Strasbourg Court’s case law is not decorative language for official correspondence. It is a living standard that must actually be applied.
I hope this analysis will be useful — both to those who, like me, submit public information requests and encounter responses of this kind, and to those who sign them.
Magyar Helsinki Bizottság v. Hungary
1. The Facts
A Hungarian human rights NGO — the Hungarian Helsinki Committee — requested information from police units concerning the names of court-appointed public defenders and the number of their appointments in criminal proceedings, as part of research into the effectiveness of the legal aid system. Two of the 28 police units refused, classifying the information as personal data. Hungarian courts, including the Supreme Court, upheld the refusal on the basis that defenders were private individuals rather than persons exercising public functions.
2. The Grand Chamber’s Central Legal Finding
The Grand Chamber held that Article 10 of the Convention encompasses a right of access to information held by public authorities, provided four criteria are satisfied simultaneously: (i) the purpose of the request is to contribute to public debate — as a preparatory step toward journalistic, civic, or academic activity; (ii) the information itself is of public interest; (iii) the requester acts as a social “watchdog” — a journalist, NGO representative, researcher, or similarly positioned actor; and (iv) the information already exists and is ready to be provided, without requiring collection or compilation from scratch.
3. Why citing this judgment as a basis for refusal is legally incoherent
The refusal by the head of the Interregional Directorate — invoking Magyar Helsinki Bizottság as partial justification — is legally flawed in its very premise. This judgment establishes the right of access to information. It does not supply grounds for denying it.
As for the “excessive workload” rationale: the Grand Chamber expressly stated (§§ 169, 179) that citing difficulties in gathering information that already exists is an unacceptable basis for refusal. The argument becomes all the more untenable when the authority in question is itself under an independent statutory obligation to publish this information proactively.
4. Practical Consequences
Under the standard established by the Grand Chamber, any refusal to provide information of public interest — held by a penal institution and necessary for the exercise of human rights oversight — constitutes an interference with the right guaranteed by Article 10. That interference is permissible only if it is lawful, pursues a legitimate aim, and is necessary in a democratic society. A refusal grounded in “too much work to collect” satisfies none of these conditions.
The applicant has every right to challenge this refusal before an administrative court and, once domestic remedies are exhausted, before the European Court of Human Rights.
