atlatszo.hu collects rejected tobacco shop tenders

In a bid to keep distance from the case and be able to refuse freedom of information requests, the Hungarian government started to return the rejected tobacco shop tenders to the applicants, after the state monopoly for the sale of tobacco came into effect on 1 July 2013. Atlatszo.hu’s lawyers reminded the government of the fact that the data custodian is not entitled to decide over how and for how long they store public information. If the aim of the datasets’ management ceases to exist, personal information should be redacted from the documents but information accessible under the scope of the Freedom of Information Act is to be kept for public access. Therefore the redacted tenders should be held by the Ministry of National Development, the authority supervising the activities of the National Tobacco Sales Nonprofit Ltd. Atlatszo.hu collects the returned tenders at [email protected] in order to compare the rejected proposals and reveal the alleged abuse of power.

This article was originally published in Hungarian language on 08 June 2013.