Federal Act
on Freedom of Information in the Administration
(Freedom of Information Act, FoIA)

¹ The right of ac­cess shall be re­stric­ted, de­ferred or re­fused if such ac­cess to an of­fi­cial doc­u­ment:

a.

sig­ni­fic­antly harms the free opin­ion-form­ing and de­cision-mak­ing pro­cesses of an au­thor­ity which is sub­ject to this Act, or of an­oth­er le­gis­lat­ive, ad­min­is­trat­ive or ju­di­cial body;

b.

ob­structs an au­thor­ity from achiev­ing the in­ten­ded ob­ject­ives when tak­ing spe­cif­ic meas­ures;

c.

may com­prom­ise Switzer­land’s do­mest­ic and in­ter­na­tion­al se­cur­ity;

d.

may af­fect Switzer­land’s in­terests in mat­ters of for­eign policy and in­ter­na­tion­al re­la­tions;

e.

may af­fect re­la­tions between the Fed­er­al Gov­ern­ment and the can­tons, or inter-can­ton­al re­la­tions;

f.

may af­fect the eco­nom­ic or mon­et­ary in­terests of Switzer­land;

g.

may re­veal pro­fes­sion­al, busi­ness or man­u­fac­tur­ing secrets; or

h.

may res­ult in the re­lease of in­form­a­tion provided vol­un­tar­ily by a third party to an au­thor­ity which un­der­took to main­tain secrecy with re­gard thereto.

² The right of ac­cess shall be re­stric­ted, de­ferred or re­fused where ac­cess to an of­fi­cial doc­u­ment may ad­versely af­fect the pri­vacy of a third party, un­less ex­cep­tion­ally out­weighed by pub­lic in­terest.