During the 1992 US election campaign it emerged that the Home Office had searched its records to determine if Bill Clinton had applied for UK citizenship while he was a student at Oxford in the late 1960s.

The embarrassing consequences of this disclosure, and its implications, continued to reverberate for many months afterwards.

The revelation raised the question of whether the Home Office's Immigration and Nationality Department (IND) files should be subject to the same rules as to secrecy as those, for example, of the Inland Revenue and the DSS.In Mr Clinton's case the explanation for the search and the subsequent official press briefings was, as the (then) Home Secretary put it, that a straight 'no comment' would have 'had the effect of leaving the story running'.

A better response may have been: 'We never give out information of that nature about anyone' .

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as is often heard when defence and other sensitive areas of government are involved.

Indeed that, more or less, was the reaction when, barely a month after Mr Clinton's election, the Home Office was asked about the immigration status of a Mr Onanugu, an employee of the Thresher off-licence chain at the centre of the allegations concerning the former Chancellor of Exchequer Norman Lamont's purchases from one of its outlets in Paddington.Whatever may have motivated the abortive search of the Clinton papers, the admission that it had been undertaken implied that if there was sufficient media pressure the government would be willing to provide information about an individual's dealings with it, on grounds of 'public interest'.

But should not people be able to conduct business with the departments or agencies of the state on the basis that it would not be divulged to all and sundry save with their express consent?Foreign rulers, politicians and other celebrities often become the focus of public attention both in Britain and abroad in situations involving crime, political or social notoriety or personal achievement.

When this happens, the media seeks to expose every detail of their lives.

Unwelcome disclosure of official information about them may lead to damaging or embarrassing consequences for them.

We are not however concerned with their right to privacy, which is 'different from confidentiality and (goes) well beyond it.

It is not confined to secrets' .

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per Popplewell, J in R v Broadcasting Services Commission, Ex p.

Granada Television [1993] The Times, 31 May.Britain has a long cultural tradition of 'official secrets' the raison d'etre of which has been generally to preserve confidential information in the hands of the government.

Old establishment structures have however been under attack for some time from many quarters, among them some high judicial figures, who have called for incorporation into the UK domestic law of the European Convention on Human Rights which, it is argued, would provide the framework for a Freedom of Information Act and open up the corridors of power.There have also been certain significant moves in the direction of open government by ministers and senior civil servants.

Change is thus on the horizon, albeit somewhat distant, but private individuals still remain vulnerable in the hands of government authorities as regards disclosure of information concerning them.S.2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911 (as amended by the Official Secrets Act 1920) was repealed and replaced by the Official Secrets Act 1989 in the wake of the Sarah Tisdall, Clive Ponting and the Spycatcher cases in the mid-1980s.

Under the 1989 Act it is an offence for a member of the security services or a Crown servant or contractor to make damaging disclosures of information or documents in the fields of security and intelligence, defence, international relations and certain criminal activities without proper authorisation.

In essence, however, the Act merely put a modern gloss on an ancient regime.Most cases on the subject have involved either criminal prosecutions for unauthorised disclosure/communication of official information or civil claims for injunction or damages for breach of duty in the fields of employment, contract or other privileged relationships, but there is scant jurisprudence on officially authorised or inspired publication by the government of material relating to private persons.

Such material may include or consist of information or documents provided by the person concerned or received by the state from its own agents or from third parties in the course or form of 'intelligence'.

It is only in relation to information provided by the person concerned that they may have a claim, if at all, to protection on the ground of confidentiality in the sense of a breach of duty owed by the state.The nearest measure to any form of Freedom of Information legislation that Britain has is the Public Records Act 1958.

It permits access to certain 'public records' (defined in the first schedule as including 'records of or held in any department of Her Majesty's government in the UK).

There are two important qualifications to this.

First, there is a process of sifting and selection which has to be gone through before the records are placed in the Public Records Office and, secondly, there is a general '30-year' period of limitation, so that essentially only historical rather than contemporary records are available for inspection.The '30-year' rule is not sacrosanct, for under s.5(2) of the Act 'if it appears to the person responsible for any public records which have been selected by him...for permanent preservation that they contain information which was obtained from members of the public under such conditions that the opening of those records to the public after (30 years) would or might constitute a breach of good faith on the part of the government or on the part of the person who obtained the information' then provision is made for conditions to be imposed on the right of public inspection for an extension of the 30-year period.

The Act thus recognises the principle of good faith and an implicit obligation of secrecy whether this is for the protection of the individual who provided or procured, or, it is submitted, who is the subject of the information.In R v Galvin (1987) 2 All ER 851, a criminal case where the Court of Appeal quashed a conviction of the accused for lack of a proper direction to the jury on the question whether the material he had communicated was not widely available as a result of official actions, there was a passing reference, by Lord Lane CJ to 'the situation in civil law where a person has received confidential information from another is under an obligation (enforceable by action) not to disclose that information...'.

The authorities were extensively reviewed and the state of the law was well summarised by Lord Keith in the 'Spychatcher' case of Attorney-General v Guardian Newspapers Ltd & Others (No.2) (1988) 3 All ER 545.That the courts recognise a doctrine of confidentiality of information imparted or acquired within certain relationships is not therefore in doubt, but what about a situation where a person has given or is obliged to supply information about him/herself to government authorities in the ordinary course of business, (eg in applications for driving licences, naturalisation, etc)? Is the provider of such information entitled to assume that it will be treated as confidential and not be disclosed by the state without his or her express authority?The state, is unique in this respect by virtue of its very nature and function and cannot be equated with a private person or a public body, and communications to it may not be protected by the notion of secrecy imported into other relationships, for the 'public interest' principle has two facets: the preservation of confidence and the need to disclose.

Both these have to be weighed and a balance struck in favour of one or the other.

In other words, the government can always rely on a claim or defence of 'public interest' in the disclosure by it of information about an individual, even though it might have received such information in circumstances of confidentiality from that individual, on the ground that government exists and operates for the benefit of the body politic and not for itself as an entity apart.In Mr Clinton's case, as he was at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar his status was clearly that of an alien who had been admitted to the UK as a student for a limited period.

The qualifications for acquiring citizenship of the UK and colonies were so stringent then, as indeed they are for becoming a British citizen now, that he could not have fulfilled them ordinarily, given his short stay.

Then there was the naturalisation process itself, which was fairly cumbersome and expensive.

At best he might have just written to the Home Office asking for guidance.

If so his letter would probably have been treated as a routine enquiry, without the correspondence being placed in his file.Only an application for naturalisation proper or an extension of stay would have found its way into his records as such.

Home Office records would therefore have yielded very little, but if they did contain something 'incriminating' as it were, then it was hardly likely that any disclosure would have been forthcoming so easily.

Future historians would have to wait for considerably longer than the proverbial '30 years' for gaining access to his file, if it exists and is ever selected for permanent preservation under the Public Records Act.But what if Mr Clinton had feared that something adverse to him might be uncovered and if he had wanted to prevent disclosure? Even a threat of legal action in these circumstances is self-defeating, for it would be tantamount to an admission that there is something to hide.

This is the dilemma which inhibits action in such cases.

Unless there is a unity, rather than conflict or divergence, of interest between both parties, the secret will be out one way or the other, and in that sense the Home Secretary was perfectly right in saying that the story would have kept on running until media curiosity was satisfied.The contrast between Mr Clinton's and the Thresher employee's cases also well illustrates the 'public interest' point.

The presidency of the US is a matter of legitimate concern to the British public at all times and that was the implicit basis of the disclosure that the Home Office had searched its files, against the background of speculation and rumour concerning the past of a candidate for election to that office, whereas the immigration status of the Thresher employee was only incidental to the main thrust of media exposure of the private doings of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Home Office rightly refused to give information about it.What if instead of a dubious past UK immigration history, Mr Clinton was alleged to have had funds stashed away in undeclared bank accounts or had other secret assets or investments in this country and suppose that a request was made to the UK government by the US authorities for information about his financial affairs?Under s.6 of the Taxes Management Act 1970 the Commissioners of Inland Revenue and their staff have to make solemn declarations binding them to secrecy and this obligation is reinforced by s.182 of the Finance Act 1982, which makes it a criminal offence for them to reveal any information about the tax affairs of any identifiable person except in certain specified circumstances.Disclosure is permitted by a variety of statutes for certain purposes connected with, for example, exchange of information under double taxation agreements (s.816 ITCA 1988 ) or investigations by the Serious Frauds Office (s.3(1) of the Criminal Justice Act 1987).

Subject thereto however it would be unlawful for the tax affairs of an individual to be officially d ivulged and it is doubtful if a claim of public interest could be sustained outside the strict ambit of these permitted exceptions.

A similar code of secrecy exists as regards the records of the Department of Social Security by virtue of s.123 of the Social Security Administration Act 1992.

These principles were affirmed in official answers to a series of parliamentary questions tabled by Mr John Fraser, MP for Norwood, on 14 April 1993.The government is in a special position.

Communications to it by a private person cannot be clothed with a protective umbrella in the guise of a privileged relationship simply because the private individual is required to furnish information or documents to the government in the ordinary course of the government's business.

The government is not bound by any implied obligation of secrecy and indeed may unilaterally decide what and when it may disclose in the public interest.

There are however exceptions to this general rule, eg areas covered by the data protection legislation and the statutory restrictions on disclosure under tax and social security legislation noted above.

Another category of protected information is that obtained in the course of a population census .

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s.8(2) of the Census Act 1920, and s.4(2) Population (Statistics) Act 1938.

Census forms contain a pledge of secrecy (including a statement that census returns would not be placed in the Public Records Office for 100 years).