Commentaries: Art. 7

The assembly members have the right to be provided with information by the Federal Council and the Federal Administration and to inspect documents on any matter of relevance to the Confederation, provided this is required for the exercise of their parliamentary mandates.
An individual assembly member has no right to information:
1. from the joint reporting procedure and deliberations in Federal Council meetings;
2. that is classified as confidential or secret in the interests of state security or the intelligence service, or the disclosure of which to unauthorised persons may be detrimental to national interests;
3. that is treated as confidential for the protection of personal privacy*.* ¹
In the event of any disagreement between an assembly member and the Federal Council as to the extent of rights to information, the assembly member may call on the Presiding College of the council to which he or she belongs. The Presiding College mediates between the assembly member and the Federal Council.
If there is disagreement between an assembly member and the Federal Council, the Presiding College of the council has the final decision on whether the information is required to exercise the relevant parliamentary mandate.
As an alternative to permitting the inspection of documents, the Federal Council may submit a report to an assembly member if there is disagreement between the Federal Council and the assembly member as to whether the assembly member has a right to information in terms of paragraph 2 and the mediation of Presiding College of the council is unsuccessful.
The Presiding College of the council has an unrestricted right to inspect the documents of the Federal Council and the Federal Administration when preparing to mediate.

Amended by No I of the FA of 17 June 2011 (Specification of the Information Rights of the Supervisory Committees), in force since 1 Nov. 2011 (AS 2011 4537;BBl 2011 1817,1839). ↩

Art. 7

Footnotes

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