Why is the EU operating a politics of secrecy on chemical safety?

While four out five Europeans are worried about the impact of harmful chemicals on their health and the environment, the EU Commission is keeping the public in the dark over lobby battles to regulate toxic products. 

For example, the commission has spent almost three years refusing to release full documents relating to the reform of its flagship chemicals policy, REACH.

Originally intended to improve the regulation of chemicals for human health and the environment, the revision of REACH has been hotly-contested by industry.

The commission justified its refusal to share the documents by admitting it is worried that it will not be able to withstand the “unnecessary pressure from stakeholders” ‒ in other words, the lobbying ‒ that could result from the documents’ release. It’s time the commission stands up to corporate lobbyists.  

1,000 day battle

Corporate Europe Observatory first requested full access to the impact assessment of the commission’s proposal to revise REACH, and the opinion of the secretive yet powerful regulatory scrutiny board on this assessment, in November 2022. 

REACH reform is long overdue: it often operates at a snail’s pace and provides industry with numerous loopholes to keep problematic chemicals on the market. When the commission documents were released, they were heavily redacted, with the board’s opinion almost entirely blacked out. 

The European Ombudsman’s office ruled that the commission had committed maladministration by not providing these documents in a timely and unredacted form, citing European case law and the Aarhus Convention, which enables greater access to environmental information for citizens.

But despite this, in July 2025 the commission issued a final refusal to provide the documents.

This is problematic for many reasons.

These are key legislative documents concerning the reform of a vital piece of EU law. They ought to shed light on the commission’s thinking and evidence base for the revision of REACH.

Crucially, they would be an indication of the extent to which corporate lobbies have set the agenda of the REACH revision which, in 2020, started off as the centre-piece of a package to ban the most harmful chemicals in consumer products, but which has apparently been substantially diluted in industry’s favour.

Unaccountable Commission

The documents’ non-release is another example of the lack of accountability and transparency of both the commission (remember Pfizergate?), and the regulatory scrutiny board, an unelected and largely opaque body, which gets to reject proposals for new EU rules if it’s not satisfied with the evidence base or rationale. 

But the commission’s reasoning in not publishing these documents in full is hypocritical too.

Specifically, its refusal is based on the need to protect the “ongoing decision-making process” and because publishing these documents would “give rise to unwanted external pressure by various stakeholders who have an interest in this process”.

It goes on to quantify the “risk of undue and harmful pressure” as “very serious and real”. In short the commission is complaining about lobby pressure.

But the EU Court of Justice has made clear that it is the commission’s duty to prevent inappropriate attempts to influence its work — not by withholding access to documents, but by weighing all the interests at stake. 

Yet, this year alone the EU’s executive has bent over backwards to get chemicals industry voices through its door (for strategic dialogues, high-level dialogues, and more), while health and environmental NGOs have been massively out-numbered at every turn. 

At a recent commission workshop on chemicals legislation, there were only a handful of NGOs among a 450-strong crowd, mostly industry representatives.

The result? Greater exposure to harmful chemicals for EU citizens. The commission recently proposed to grant companies ridiculously-long grace periods during which they can keep using prohibited cancer-causing substances in cosmetics, products that we use in our daily lives.

Stop the lobbyists

Don’t get us wrong. We too are highly concerned that industry lobbyists are having undue influence. But the answer to tackling lobbying is not more secrecy, but a coherent strategy by the commission to tackle it, starting by avoiding cosy gatherings with big polluters.

Then the commission could publish these and other legislative documents safely, and also help to ensure that the reform of REACH ultimately maximises health and environmental outcomes, rather than the interests of the toxics sector.

At the end of September the regulatory scrutiny board rejected an updated version of the impact assessment on the REACH revision.

Of course, neither this new RSB opinion nor the updated impact assessment are in the public domain.

This means that we don’t know which evidence the commission is relying on, how it has been influenced by corporate lobbies, and whether the RSB’s opinion is justified. 

With the commission, by its own admission, deregulating like mad, armed with industry’s wish-lists of rules that it would like scrapped, now is not the time for more secrecy. Instead, it must confront the Big Toxics lobby.

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