The Information Commissioner's Office is now working on a Decision Notice, regarding our complaint over a year ago, about the Foreign & Commonwealth Office's refusal to divulge just the names and job titles (no other details were requested at all), of the Russian and United Kingdom diplomats expelled as persona non grata, following the diplomatic incident over the failure to extradite or prosecute the suspect Andrei Lugovoi, in the radioactive Polonium 210 murder case of British citizen Alexander Litvinenko who was poisoned in London in November 2006.
See the FCO diplomatic expulsions Polonium 210 murder affair blog category archive.
Letter from the ICO:
ICO
Information Commissioner's Office
Promoting public access to official information
and protecting your personal information
[name]
[address]16th July 2008
Case Reference Number FS5017nnnnDear Mr XXX
I write further to my letter to you of 21 May 2008 regarding your complaint against the Foreign and Commonwealth Office under the Freedom of Information Act.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office have now provided me with further information on its handling of your freedom of information request and I now intend to begin drafting a Decision Notice on your complaint.
I will contact you again when the Decision Notice is ready to be issued but in the meantime please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or concerns.
Yours sincerely
[signature]
Paul Warbrick
Senior Complaints officerInformation Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF
t: 0845 630 6060 f: 01625 524510 e: mail@ico.gov.uk w: ico.gov.uk
We are not convinced that any Freedom of Information Act 2000 exemptions should apply to Russian Federation diplomats at all, after all, they themselves are not bound by the Act in any way.
The expelled diplomats may or may not have been specialist "intelligence officers" working under diplomatic cover, it is conceivable that none of them were anything more than normal diplomatic civil servants. Naming the expelled Russian diplomats does not imply that they , personally, had any knowledge or involvement in the radioactive Polonium-210 murder.
The FCO could have chosen to try to use the FOIA Section 24 National Security exemption, but that might have been seen as official confirmation that some or all of those expelled were "spies", whether or not this was true.
The FCO could have chosen to try to use FOIA Section 27 International Relations exemption, but presumably they know that this would fail under the public interest test.
Instead they have tried to use the FOIA Section 40 Personal Data exemption, which surely cannot apply to just the names and former job titles of public representatives of the United Kingdom and the Russian Federation, whose details are known by every other Government and intelligence agency and most of the world's press corps ?
See also London Diplomatic List - can you spot the expelled Russian diplomats ?
