Daniele Gounord, Church of Scientology’s public affairs director in Paris (right), and researchers used France’s open government laws to trace taxpayer-funded junkets by anti-religious extremists with ties to certain French MPs.

The Church of Scientology in France has not only been a vigorous promoter of freedom of information laws; French Scientologists played a significant role in bringing them into existence.

In 1977, a Church member and graduate of the prestigious Ecole polytechnique co-founded with a colleague a committee to promote the need for free access to information in government files. This association set about informing the public as well as prominent officials and politicians about the benefits of freedom of information legislation and the importance of being able to inspect administrative agency files containing personal data on individuals. The group put forth a number of proposals for a FOI law that received extensive coverage in national French media such as Le Monde. Group representatives also met with the president of the Law Commission of the National Assembly to discuss FOI legislation, and in fact, the group distributed a brochure on the topic to all members of the French parliament. It proved to be a pivotal contribution towards passage of the FOI laws in 1978.

Since then, the Church of Scientology has become widely known in France as a staunch advocate of the FOI laws, uncovering and publishing documents that reveal government abuse of power.

Requests for documents are often denied by government agencies on the grounds of “national security.” While this is sometimes justified, it is often simply a device to refuse legitimate requests and deny citizens access to information.

A stunning example of such arbitrary refusal involves France’s Renseignements Généraux (General Information), or RG, a security agency with broad powers to accumulate intelligence about economic, political, social and virtually any other conceivable threats to the state. A former chief inspector of the RG, Patrick Rougelet, in his 1997 book RG: The Scandal Machine (R.G. La machine à scandales), characterised the RG and its filing system in these terms:

“With the RG, the whole of France is ‘under surveillance’... every day, there are hundreds of surveillance operations into the private lives of ordinary citizens of which people are completely unaware.” According to Rougelet, no member of parliament has ever managed to thoroughly look into these RG files and “... even the French Data Protection Agency (La Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés — CNIL) has never had access to the deepest data banks of the secret police.”

Rougelet states that none are exempt from the RG’s data collection:

“Many people claim that these archives concern only a limited number of people, essentially those involved in public life. That is false. If, in addition to journalists, one includes parliamentarians, elected officials — including councillors of the smallest cities — businesspeople, intellectuals, those considered leaders of opinion in and outside Paris, there are at least 500,000 individuals on whom they have files; moreover, there are without doubt an equal number of others on whom the RG has collected information, legally or not.”

It is no wonder, then, that the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights, an official body that advises the French government, warned in June 1991 that such files represent “an especially serious threat to liberties.”