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The "thirty-year rule" is the popular name given to a law in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, and Australia that provides that the yearly cabinet papers of a government will be released publicly thirty years after they were created. == United Kingdom == In the United Kingdom, the Public Records Act 1958 states that "Public records ....other than those to which members of the public have had access before their transfer ..., shall not be available for public inspection until they have been in existence for fifty years or such other period... as the Lord Chancellor may, ... for the time being prescribe as respects any particular class of public records";〔(UK Public Records Act 1958 )〕 the closure period was reduced from fifty to thirty years by an amending act of 1967, passed during Harold Wilson's government. Among those who had repeatedly urged the scrapping of the fifty-year rule was the historian A.J.P. Taylor. There were in effect two quite distinct elements to the "rule": the first required that records be transferred from government departments to the Public Record Office (now The National Archives) after thirty years unless specific exemptions were given (by the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Council on Public Records); the second that they would be opened to public access at such time unless they were deemed likely to cause "damage to the country's image, national security or foreign relations" if they were to be released. Significant changes were made to the rules as a consequence of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOI) (which came into full effect on 1 January 2005). The FOI act essentially removed the second of the thirty-year rules (the access one), and replaced it with provisions allowing citizens to request a wide range of information before any time limit has expired; and also removed some of the exemptions which had previously applied at the thirty-year point. After thirty years, records are transferred to The National Archives, and are reviewed under the FOI act to see if they should be opened. The only rationale for keeping them closed within The National Archives is if an FOI exemption applies. As a result of this change, releases now happen monthly, rather than annually, and include more recent events, rather than only those over thirty years old. An independent inquiry chaired by Paul Dacre, editor of the ''Daily Mail'', recommended in January 2009 that the last restrictions on the release of information, such as Cabinet minutes, should be reduced to a fifteen-year embargo and phased in over a 15-year period.〔Deborah Summers ("30-year rule on government disclosure should be halved, Dacre inquiry says", ) ''The Guardian'', 29 January 2009.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Thirty-year rule」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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