Ordinance
to the Federal Act on Archiving
(Archiving Ordinance)

(Arts. 11 and 12 ArchA)

¹ Archive re­cords that are clas­si­fied ac­cord­ing to the names of people and which con­tain sens­it­ive per­son­al data shall be covered by the 50‑year ex­ten­ded re­ten­tion peri­od in ac­cord­ance with Art­icle 11 of the Act. In an in­di­vidu­al case, this may be re­duced in ac­cord­ance with Art­icles 11 and 13 of the Act or ex­ten­ded in ac­cord­ance with Art­icle 12 para­graph 2 of the Act.⁶

² If there is an over­rid­ing and le­git­im­ate pub­lic or private in­terest in pre­vent­ing the con­sulta­tion by third parties, the due re­ten­tion peri­od as per Art. 9 of the Act may be ex­ten­ded for cer­tain cat­egor­ies of archive re­cords or in an in­di­vidu­al case. The ex­ten­ded re­ten­tion peri­od for cat­egor­ies of archive re­cords shall as a rule total 50 years.

³ An over­rid­ing and le­git­im­ate pub­lic in­terest in pre­vent­ing con­sulta­tion shall ex­ist if ac­cess to the re­cords is likely:

a.

to jeop­ard­ise the in­tern­al or ex­tern­al se­cur­ity of the Con­fed­er­a­tion;

b.

to last­ingly af­fect re­la­tions with for­eign coun­tries, in­ter­na­tion­al or­gan­isa­tions or between the Con­fed­er­a­tion and the can­tons;

c.

to ser­i­ously af­fect the power of ac­tion of the Fed­er­al Coun­cil.

⁴ An over­rid­ing and le­git­im­ate private in­terest in pre­vent­ing con­sulta­tion may ex­ist in par­tic­u­lar if con­sulta­tion of the re­cords would lead to a pre­ma­ture dis­clos­ure of pro­fes­sion­al or man­u­fac­tur­ing secrets.

⁵ Re­cord groups with spe­cial re­ten­tion peri­ods in ac­cord­ance with Art­icle 12 para­graph 1 of the Act are lis­ted in An­nex 3. The Fed­er­al De­part­ment of Home Af­fairs may amend or sup­ple­ment this list. The most re­cent list in each case shall be held at the Fed­er­al Archives and shall be pub­licly ac­cess­ible. The up­dated ap­pendix shall be pub­lished in the Of­fi­cial Re­cord each year.