From ronsmuerto@hotmail.com Wed Jun 24 22:19:12 EDT 1998 Article: 155190 of alt.religion.scientology Path: mistletoe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!honeysuckle.srv.cs.cmu.edu!bb3.andrew.cmu.edu!pitt.edu!newsflash.concordia.ca!news.dal.ca!sunqbc.risq.qc.ca!news-peer.gip.net!news.gsl.net!gip.net!news-peer.sprintlink.net!news-peer-east.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!news.idt.net!news.maxwell.syr.edu!nntp2.dejanews.com!nnrp1.dejanews.com!not-for-mail From: ronsmuerto@hotmail.com Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology Subject: Sweden: Content of NOTS not harmful to USA relationship Date: Wed, 24 Jun 1998 21:54:38 GMT Organization: Deja News - The Leader in Internet Discussion Lines: 92 Message-ID: <6mrsiu$mkk$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 207.121.52.31 X-Article-Creation-Date: Wed Jun 24 21:54:38 1998 GMT X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/3.0 (Win95; U) Xref: skinner.boltz.cs.cmu.edu alt.religion.scientology:155190 Court enforces the public availability of the secret scriptures of Scientology Sweden's highest administrative court makes a decision and brings the administration into an awkward situation Newspaper put text on internet From: "Frankfurter Rundschau" June 20, 1998 by Hannes Gamillscheg The Swedish "principle of public availability" is more important than international copyright. By this decision, Sweden's highest administrative court has compelled the administration to make secret scriptures of the Scientology movement available as public documents. Copenhagen, June 19, 1998. Six months ago, after massive pressure from the Scientologists and the US administration, the Stockholm cabinet declared the "holy books" of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard to be secret material. After last Thursday's judgment, this decision must be revised. With that, the long-term struggle over the public availability of the Scientology books escalates anew. The organization, recognized as a church in Sweden, has designated Hubbard's texts as "religious material to which outsiders should not have access," explained information chief Tarja Wulto. In Hubbard's opinion, a person is possessed with alien beings which limit his development. This is supposed to be a consequence of the settlement of earth 75 million years ago by galactic Lord Xenu with spaceships full of beings. The understanding of the texts, from the Scientologist perspective, requires a development of awareness which can only be obtained through expensive courses offered by the organization. It is for this reason that the writings with the titles of OT and NOT are strongly secret. However, they were publicly accessible in Sweden, after Zenon Panoussis, a Scientology critic, sent a copies of them to the administration and to Parliament. By that action the books became "public documents" which, according to the Swedish principle of public availability, can be viewed by anybody. A tug-of-war between the authorities and the Scientologists ensued. In the parliamentary library, where Hubbard's texts were made available, members of the movement had the writings checked out round the clock so that nobody else could get at their "Bible." At the same time Sweden was put under pressure by Washington. The US administration complained about the violation of the copyrights which belonged to the Scientology Church and threatened to sue Stockholm in the World Trade Organization. The Swedish government gave in to the pressure and pulled the controversial material off the shelves. By that, they invoked a determination that the principle of public availability could be restricted if it harmed the relationship with another country. However, the administration court rejected this interpretation. The administration can only invoke secrecy if the content of the document would endanger the relationship with another country. The "Scientology Bible" contains nothing which could harm the relationship to the USA, said the judge. Because of this, the principle of public available remains in effect. Justice Minister Laila Freivalds said that she would submit to this decision. Now the Scientologists want to sue Sweden in the European Court. The US embassy in Stockholm expressed regret that the rights of a "corporate body of the USA" were being violated, and stated that it was the duty of the Swedish administration to solve this problem. After the court's decision, the Stockholm newspaper, "Dagens Nyheter", placed the entire "Scientology Bible" on their internet home page. On Friday afternoon, it had been taken down for unstated reasons. German Scientology News: http://cisar.org/trnmenu.htm Nots 34 http://home.sol.no/~spirous/CoS/archive/events/9805henson-case/nots34_anal.ht ml "Peter, would you rather have a brother or a sister?" "Oh, if it's not too difficult for you, Mommy, I would like most of all to have a pony." -----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==----- http://www.dejanews.com/ Now offering spam-free web-based newsreading