GPK: Focus should be placed on background discussions
Published: Friday, Nov 17th 2023, 18:30
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The Control Committees of the National Council and Council of States (CC) make eight recommendations in their report on the coronavirus leaks published on Friday. The focus should be on background discussions between communication managers and media representatives.
At the media conference in Bern on Friday, National Councillor Thomas de Courten (SVP/BL) said that clear rules and guidelines should have been drawn up so that it was also clear what a background discussion was and what the content could be in order to explain a Federal Council decision.
The second recommendation concerns the deletion period for emails in the Federal Administration. Access to these sources was very limited, as they were deleted after the employment relationship ended, de Courten continued. The recommendation is that this deletion period should be reviewed within the administration, at least for managers.
According to de Courten, a third recommendation involves defining what exactly constitutes an indiscretion so that this can be clarified. Fourthly, more needs to be known about the decision-making processes within the Federal Council, as it had been established that the Federal Council minutes were written in a very summary manner and that the GPK was therefore no longer able to follow the decision-making processes exactly.
A fifth recommendation concerns sharpening the training of the communication departments with regard to access rights to classified documents. Sixthly, written co-reporting procedures should remain an integral part of Federal Council decisions in order to ensure quality.
Seventhly, appropriate rules should be laid down for the debriefings that the heads of department hold with their staffs as to what is or is not recorded there and what can or cannot be communicated. Eighthly, according to de Courten, indiscretions should be actively and promptly discussed in the Federal Council.
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