Confidentiality and use of substance property data from substance property data bases of the German Federal Environment Agency (Confidential Environmental Substance Information – Confides)

The task of this project is to update the requirements for the lawful handling of confidential substance data of the Federal Environment Agency as described in a legal document from 1997. This requires an analysis of the current legal situation and case law defining confidentiality. Both have undergone numerous changes in the past ten years; in some cases, fundamentally new legal norms have been added, such as the right to freedom of information. In addition, the project also takes into account for the first time substance data from areas that were not yet the subject of the previous report (pharmaceuticals and substances hazardous to water).

A further aim of this work is the creation of instructions that allow the employees of the Federal Environment Agency to utilise the results obtained as simply and effectively as possible in their daily enforcement practice. To this end, "enforcement-specific guidelines" were developed as part of the previous report, which provided an initial introduction to the confidentiality check of individual substance data. This approach is basically retained in this project, but is supplemented by the following innovations: The guidelines, which were previously mainly textual, are now each presented graphically in an assessment scheme and guide users through the basic steps of the confidentiality assessment with a few briefly summarised key questions. This enables initial orientation in the specific application case even without dealing with the legal details.