Iceland will become a haven for whistleblowers' leaked information following a unanimous vote in the Icelandic parliament to accept a Wikileaks idea to build an international "new media haven" on the island.

The move coincides with a proposal to set up Iceland as a host nation for the world's datacentres.

Iceland is now expected to pass the world's strongest press and whistleblower protection laws, and to set up an international prize for freedom of expression.

According to Wikileaks, a whistlebower website, one of the events that inspired the proposal was the gagging of Iceland's national broadcaster, RUV, by Iceland's then largest bank. Kaupthing.

RUV had planned to expose the bank's risky loans. The details appeared later on the Wikileaks website.

The parliament's general affairs committee made two changes to the original proposal. The first was to widen the arena for free speech research.

The second called for the government to look into the prospects for operating data centres in Iceland especially with respect to operational security, and to organise an international conference in Iceland on the changes to the legal environment being caused by expansion of cloud computing, data havens, and the judicial state of the internet.