EU considers overhaul of transparency rules
The EU is now shining a light on hitherto murky areas - such as its law-making process (Photo: CE)
HONOR MAHONY
31.01.2007 @ 17:38 CET
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – The European Commission is looking into how it can overhaul rules on public access to EU documents as citizens' requests for information increase year on year.
Statistics show that the council - member states' secretariat - and commission turn down one third of the applications for information access, while the parliament refuses around 20 percent.
The EU ombudsman deals with several complaints each year from disgruntled citizens not understanding why they cannot see certain documents, with the commission admitting that its four-year old law on information access is unclear.
"A quarter of all our complaints every year relate to a lack of transparency," the ombudman's office says of the 4000 complaints it receives annually.
They range from companies wanting to access audit information, MEPs wanting to get a hold of national documents through to green groups wanting sensitive environment information.
"There is a culture of secrecy running through the European Commission, and the public and groups like Friends of the Earth must fight for every piece of paper to be made public," said a Friends of the Earth campaigner last year after the ombudsman agreed that the commission had been wrong in refusing to release documents on scientific concerns about the safety of genetically modified foods.
When is a document a document?
The commission is currently looking into how its rules can be improved as it prepares for a public discussion to be launched on the issue later this spring.
According to an internal commission paper, among the key issues it will be looking at are when a working paper can be called a document (only when it is fully finished, says the commission), professional secrecy (particularly concerning competition documents) and when it can legitimately turn down a request that it considers unreasonable as the current regulation has "no provisions regarding excessive or disproportionate requests."
Another key question the commission also has to address is whether there is a time limit on their "exceptions" to document access, with Brussels currently able to turn down a request indefinitely.
The paper also notes that "there is room for improvement" concerning its websites, as different units in the commission have their own website with varying degrees of user-friendliness.
At the moment, all three institutions are in the process of setting up a "single access point" for legislative documents to stop people from having to go from pillar to post to get a document that ought to be readily available.
Political climate
MEPs have broadly welcomed the transparency drive which also means that from 2009 it will be possible to see exactly who is benefiting – and to what extent - from the bloc's sprawling farm subsidies.
Other recent initiatives saw the EU law-making process opened up last year while in autumn last year, the commission started sending new legislative proposals to national parliaments so that MPs can raise the alarm if they think the EU is reaching into an area that would be better dealt with at regional or local level.
Socialist MEP Richard Corbett says the moves are "part of a long term trend" that first required a "shift in culture" because of different traditions in the member states.
Danish MEP Jens-Peter Bonde, a veteran transparency campaigner, and generally not slow to criticise the commission, is also strongly supportive of the moves, believing they have been spurred by the shock no votes in the EU constitution referendum in 2005.
But for him the "battle" is not over. He is now looking to get the commission to be more open about the names of the people who sit on the around 3000 expert committees and groups that advise and help legislate on EU affairs.
He argues it is not possible to know whether all sides of the debate are represented, pointing out that current data does not allow you to see if the tobacco committee, for example, is top heavy with industry lobbyists or if health experts are also well represented.
He also notes that any changes to the bloc's information access laws would have to run the gamut of member states, with several governments anxious to keep the lid as much as possible on sensitive documents floating around the council.