Sweden proposes new rules for digital records at public authorities

What the proposal says

The draft bill, submitted to the Council on Legislation in March 2025, addresses a question that has grown more pressing as public administration has moved online: when does a digital document become a public record, and what must an authority preserve to meet the constitutional requirement of insight ^[1].

The principle of public access, set out in the Swedish constitution, gives any person the right to request documents held by public authorities. The right is old, but the rules were written for paper. Emails arrive every minute, databases are updated continuously, and files are often stored in systems where multiple people can change them at any time.

The proposal draws a line. A digital document that has been subject to automated processing by an authority is to be regarded as having been received or produced by that authority, and therefore falls under the principle of public access ^[1]. The bill defines automated processing as measures such as logging, time-stamping, indexing, virus-scanning and format conversion, carried out without human involvement ^[1].

Creating a document, or changing its content in a way that affects its substance, does not count as automated processing. A person drafting a reply or editing a report is not processing automatically, and the draft does not become a public document just because it is saved in the authority's system. Once it is registered, sent or archived, the position changes ^[1].

The duty to preserve metadata

The bill also proposes that authorities must, when relevant, preserve metadata that accompanies an electronic document. That includes sender, recipient, time of despatch, time of receipt, and technical properties such as file format ^[1].

The reason given is that the content of a document sometimes cannot be understood without knowing where it came from, when, and in what form. An email, for example, is more than the words in the body. The sender, the time, the subject line and any attachments form part of what the document says.

The duty to preserve does not mean that every property of every file must be kept forever. The proposal says relevance is the test: metadata that is needed to understand the content, or that is necessary to meet other legal duties, must be kept. The rest may be deleted ^[1].

Where the evidence question comes in

Public authorities in Sweden handle questions that can end up in court or before an ombudsman: decisions on benefits, licences, permits and sanctions. A document submitted by a citizen, or produced by the authority, may be challenged months or years later.

The question then is not only whether the document exists, but whether it is the same document, and whether it was received or sent when the authority says it was.

Free assessment of evidence under Swedish procedural law means that courts weigh each piece of evidence according to how reliable it appears ^[2]. A digital document can be changed silently. Metadata can be altered. A time-stamp can be forged. The question is how the authority shows that what it presents is what it received, unchanged.

The bill recognises that metadata matters, but it does not say how to prove the metadata is correct. That question is left to general principles on handling and storage of documents.

What this means for you

If your organisation submits documents to Swedish public authorities, or if you work in an authority that handles requests from the public, three questions are worth asking now.

First, do you keep your own record of what you sent, when, and to whom? A copy in your sent folder is something, but it can be edited. A sealed copy with a time-stamp that nobody, including you, can change without it showing, is better.

Second, if you are an authority, how do you show that an email or file you received on a particular date has not been changed since? Logging the receipt is one thing. Proving the content has not been touched is another.

Third, where automated processing is defined as including time-stamping and indexing, does your system record when those steps happened, and can you show that the record itself has not been altered?

The proposal is now with the Council on Legislation, and the government expects the law to enter into force on 1 July 2026 ^[1]. The principle of public access is constitutional, and it applies already. What the bill does is clarify how it applies to digital documents processed by machines.

What to watch

The Council on Legislation will issue its opinion in the coming months. If the bill proceeds without major changes, the new rules will apply from 1 July 2026 ^[1].

The question of how to prove that a digital document is unchanged is not addressed in the bill, but it is implicit in the duty to preserve metadata. The bill assumes that authorities can show what they received, when, and that it has not been altered. How they do that is a question for each authority to answer.

For anyone handling records that may later be questioned, the practical step is to decide early what you will point to on the day someone asks for proof. A system that logs events is useful. A system that can show the log has not been edited is more useful still.