The Investigative Journalism Center has won a lawsuit against the Customs Service which failed to ensure access to information. Moldova's Supreme Court ruled that the service had violated not just the plaintiff's right to information, but also “the citizens' right to active, veridical information on matters of public concern”. In a press release from the Investigative Journalism Center, it is said that the Supreme Court's ruling reverses the decision of the Courts of Appeal, which ruled in favor of the Customs Service. The Supreme Court held that “the information requested by the Investigative Journalism Center was not a matter of commercial secret and, therefore, wasn't protected by the legislation on the commercial secret”, the press release says. The Investigative Journalism Center took action against the Customs Service in late 2008, when it was conducting an investigation into dubious affairs with chicken meat. The Customs Service was petitioned to provide information on the amounts of meat and meat products exported and imported by the government and economic entities, the list of states where chicken meat was being imported from and exported to, as well as statistical data on the frauds concerning these products, discovered at the customs checkpoints in the last two years. But the Customs Service refused to offer any piece of information, describing it as classified, suggesting at the same time that some information could be obtained from the Statistics Service, while data on frauds from the Interiors Ministry. The Ministry, for its part, refused to offer the information, while the Statistics Service offered only part of it. The judgment of the Supreme Court is irreversible. Contacted by Info-Prim Neo, the head of the legal department at the Customs Service, Radu Chilaru, said he didn't see the judgment yet, but they would obey it.