A secure democratic Net is a fundamental right

In Belgium there are no standards for logging or e-discovery. It is even not clear what you have to archive as electronic material. The chaos is even greater because the national archiving laws are in total contradiction with the 'public disclosure' laws (if we can call them like that because the level of public disclosure in Belgium is very very limited, especially if you compare it to the level of public access to governmental or administrative documents in the US for example). 

The national archiving laws oblige to keep anything in any format that is important to understand the decisions that are taken. The public disclosure law only obliges you to show the final documents with the final decisions. You can say that this is not a contradiction, but it gives way to totally different interpretations in the reality of every day functioning. If documents that are being used to prepare a decisions are legally not important and will never be made public - according to present laws (and laws can't go backwards normally) than why should you keep them or try to restore them if you lose them or check that all these documents were saved in a proper manner and are still usable after so many months or years.

The biggest effect of this chaos is on email, as the last months have shown. There is no legal obligation to keep emails that install no legal rights. If you send an email telling someone that he or she will get a subsidy than it should be kept, if you send an email saying that the question is being investigated, than you shouldn't (except if it is being seen as the only legal declaration of reception of your demand). The effect is that the archiving of emails is different according to the local network reglementation and installation. (advice ; just archive anything and filter your email against films and music and flash)

So why is this now so important for Mr Dewael. He is no longer minister of the interior but president of the Chamber of parliament, but if he will be able to hold on to that position is another matter. It was clear that he had to leave his post as minister because there was no external person had any clear idea about which documents would be turned up next about some nominations in the management functions of the national police force. When some files were published in which his advisors warned him for the dubious nature of some of these nominations, he said that he couldn't have given those to the parliament that was investigating these allegations because the files had been archived and he couldn't access them. This is very hard to believe for an outsider (and so the press and the political opponents).

It should now be clear for the political world that not only do we need more public access, but that we also need to set up clear rules for administrations, political institutions and enterprises about what they should keep whatever the format it is available in. The advantage is that the decisions will become more transparent and that when there is an investigation, all that should be found will be found immediately (and not in bits and pieces during months).

This can also be a good basis for some written agreements between the police and justice departments at one side and the administrations and enterprises at the other about how they will announce and set up the e-discovery forensic process.