For years, open data activists have criticized that laws are not free and extensively accessible to the public. The “e-announcement” project has now been delayed indefinitely.
The legally binding digital publication of laws in Germany will not start in early 2022 as originally planned. This emerges from a response from the federal government to a request from the Left MP Anke Domscheit-Berg, which is available to the German Press Agency.
The Federal Ministry of Justice is now assuming that the first stage of implementation will be reached in the first quarter of 2023. The federal government now no longer mentions a period for the complete expansion of the “e-proclamation”.
The digitization of the legislative process was an important project of the black-red government coalition. With the “e-proclamation”, the content of the law is to be made available to all citizens uniformly and, above all, free of charge. So far, new laws have been announced in the Federal Law Gazette and only come into force once they have been published there. The Federal Law Gazette is published by the private Bundesanzeiger Verlag and is chargeable in the comprehensive, researchable and printable version. This procedure has been criticized by open data activists for years.
In December 2018, the then Federal Minister of Justice Katarina Barley (SPD) promised in a newspaper interview: “We will announce laws and ordinances digitally without restriction in future.” The electronic Federal Law Gazette will then contain the only binding version of laws and regulations. The Ministry justified the delay, among other things, with the fact that the Federal Office of Justice, which will be responsible for the promulgation in the future, has urgently asked «to postpone the test and actual operation for the announcement platform, as a considerable foreseeable at the end of the legislative period Load peak with many and sometimes hasty announcements will have to be dealt with ».
Domscheit-Berg sharply criticized the delay: “The federal government simply cannot digitize the administration.” It was only when she asked that the government announced that implementation would be further delayed. Providing the citizens with free and functional digital access to new laws and ordinances «apparently has no priority, because the project was postponed to the current election period in the last election period». Now the responsibility will again be left to a new government.
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