Image: Heikki Saukkomaa / Lehtikuva

A number of Finnish editors-in-chief are protesting a decision by Parliamentary officials to effectively reverse the practice of opening up the institution’s visitor logs to public scrutiny.

Last spring, officials decided to only keep guest lists for a period of 24 hours before destroying them. Previously, the practice was to keep such information available for scrutiny for one year.

The practice of purging the logs appeared to have begun after Finland’s Supreme Administrative Court ruled in December 2016 that officials should hand over the visitor register upon request.

At the time, Svenska Yle and the Open Ministry NGO both went to court to request visitor information to determine who had been going to Parliament to meet MPs. They also wanted to understand which organisations and companies visited the legislature for the purpose of lobbying parliamentarians.

Yle’s af Björkesten: Transparency at stake

According to the editors, the new practice has for significantly hampered reporters from different media houses from doing their work.

The grievance seeks to redress to the new parliamentary practice and cites its refusal to provide public information contrary to the court order and failure to comply with information management norms.

The complaint was lodged by the association representing editors-in-chief and a total of 29 media companies and was signed by the editors-in-chief of organisations including Yle, STT and Helsingin Sanomat.

Yle's head of news and current affairs Marit af Björkesten said that there had been a long process behind the complaint.

"As far back as three years ago, Svenska Yle requested these logs from the Parliament and STT reacted to it this week by asking other media, including Yle to co-sign the complaint," af Björkesten noted.

"This is a matter of several different things. First legality, in other words that the Parliament should obey the law. Second is the need to safeguard the conditions for critical and investigative journalism. And not least the principle of transparency, in other words, that official documents are public unless otherwise prescribed and in this case, it has not been otherwise written in the law," she added.