On 1 September 2025, the Freedom of Information Act (Federal Law Gazette I 5/2024; "IFG") comes into force. One hundred years after official secrecy was enshrined in the constitution (Art 20 para 2 B-VG) and almost forty years after the obligation to provide information (Art 20 para 3 B-VG) was created, both have come to an end: Official secrecy and the obligation to provide information are abolished and replaced by a "right of access to information" (Art 22a B-VG).

This right is twofold: certain legal entities must publish certain information on their own initiative - "proactively". Other legal entities only have to provide information upon request.

The future "right of access to information" will apply to everyone. As this right has constitutional status, it is referred to as a "fundamental right to information", which is intended to symbolise the modern, open and transparent constitutional state of the 21st century (https://www.bundeskanzleramt.gv.at/themen/informationsfreiheitsgesetz.html).

The fact that official secrecy was never intended to protect the office, but rather the citizens to whom an official activity relates, is overlooked by the claqueurs of all-encompassing transparency, as is the obvious tension between this new right to information and the fundamental right to data protection, the duty to protect business and trade secrets and the principle of mere party publicity in administrative proceedings. In practice, the restrictions to this fundamental right will therefore be more interesting than the fundamental right to information:

• This means that only "information of general interest" - i.e. information that is relevant to a wider group of people - must be published proactively.
• Moreover, this publication obligation only covers information that arises from 1 September 2025 (Art. 151 para. 68 B-VG), but not information that has already arisen by this date.
• Initially, all administrative bodies of the federal government, federal states and municipalities are obliged to publish the information to be published in the newly created information register (data.gv.at) must publish such information. The National Council and the Federal Council, the Court of Audit and the Ombudsman Board as well as the bodies of ordinary jurisdiction, the administrative courts, the Administrative Court and the Constitutional Court must publish such information on their websites or in the federal legal information system (www.ris.bka,gv.at) to be published.
• Municipalities with up to 5,000 inhabitants are exempt from the publication obligation, but can publish voluntarily (although it will be interesting to see who will do so).
• Companies subject to the control of the courts of audit are not obliged to publish information proactively, but must make it available on request unless there are compelling reasons to keep it confidential. This will depend on a case-by-case assessment.
• Professional interest groups - such as the bar associations - are only obliged to provide information in matters within their own sphere of activity and only to their members.

Contrary to what is claimed in some quarters, the new freedom of information is not more of the same the old obligation to provide information. What is new above all is the obligation of certain legal entities to publish information on their own initiative - without the need for a request from an interested party. In times when artificial intelligence is scouring the internet to appropriate third-party knowledge and pass it off as its own creation, it is foreseeable that this proactive duty to provide information will become a touchstone for the intellectual property of those who are still used to thinking for themselves.