EuropeanVoice.com, Jim Brunsden, 24/4/2008

The European Commission will next week present proposals  to give citizens greater access to documents held by  EU institutions.

The move to increase transparency, which will be published on 30 April, follows adverse judgements from the European Court of Justice (ECJ), which criticised the application of the existing rules on access to documents.

According to a draft version of the proposal, the Commission will seek to alter provisions on member states' right to veto the disclosure of documents. The new rules would require EU institutions to consult member states before granting access to documents provided by national governments, unless the document is already in the public domain. Member states will be able to request that a document is not made public, but only on the grounds that doing so would contravene either provisions contained in the EU regulation on access to documents or national law.

The Commission argues that the redrafting is needed following a ruling from the ECJ in December 2007, which found that the EU executive was at fault for not disclosing documents from the German government after a request from an environmental campaign group. The documents concerned a request from Germany that the enlargement of a factory and the extension of a runway should be allowed on an area covered by the EU's habitats directive. The ECJ ruled that, under current access-to-documents regulation, member states can block disclosure only if they make an objection based on the regulation's list of ‘exceptions to publication'.

Disclosure

The Commission is also proposing to limit the current practice of blacking out names and other personal data in disclosed documents. This follows a 8 November ruling from the ECJ that current practice is too restrictive. The redrafted legislation would state that the disclosure of names and titles of “public office holders, civil servants, and interest representatives” should be allowed, unless it would adversely affect them.

The European Parliament's civil liberties, justice and home affairs committee will hold a public hearing on the proposal on 2 June. One issue to be discussed will be whether the proposal should be redrafted to take into account new provisions on data protection contained in the Lisbon treaty. These include, notably, the opportunity to extend the scope of the regulation to cover other EU institutions, such as the European Central Bank, the European Investment Bank, and the European Court of Justice. The current regulation covers only the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament and the Commission.

The Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), a campaign group on the activities of lobbyists, has been highly critical of Commission decisions to black out names. Oliver Hodemann, an official for the CEO, said that blacking out lobbyists' identity was “stretching the interpretation of the regulation”. He said that the Commission had not performed well against the current targets for responding to access requests, noting that there had been a “very lax implementation of the deadlines to respond”.