Parliament to review rules on access to documents

MEP calls for overhaul of transparency rules, while Commission is accused of limiting access.

A bruising four-year battle over public access to EU documents moves into a new phase this month with Michael Cashman, a UK centre-left MEP, asking the European Parliament to approve his radical proposals to overhaul the EU’s ten-year-old transparency rules.

Cashman is confident that a new climate of transparency will help his proposals gain approval from Parliament’s civil liberties committee; a vote is expected on 23 November. Previous attempts failed in the face of opposition from the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP).

Cashman’s report was pushed back to the top of the agenda after the Parliament passed a resolution in September demanding all EU institutions agree to “more transparent EU rules on freedom of information”. Cashman said more transparency was urgently needed in the wake of the economic and financial crises, which had left citizens being “more confused about what the EU is doing, [and] why it is doing it”.

Confident of majority support

He was confident of a majority in the committee based on support from his own Socialists and Democrats (S&D), Liberals, Greens and the European United Left/Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) group, as well as a growing number of MEPs from the EPP. A plenary vote could follow in December.

“I want a strong mandate from the Parliament with a large majority so that we can resist any backtracking from member states and the European Commission,” said Cashman. Along with the European ombudsman and the European data-protection supervisor, Cashman has criticised the Commission’s 2008 proposals on transparency as an attempt to limit access to EU documents and a step backwards.

Instead, Cashman has proposed a far-reaching interpretation of what constitutes a document and which texts should be made available to the public. He recommends that all preparatory legislative drafts, memoranda and legal opinions be made public.

He has proposed to make EU documents available via a single “user-friendly” website and to standardise the classification of internal documents such as ‘EU top secret’, ‘EU confidential’ or ‘EU restricted’. He has also called for access rules to apply to documents that member states share with the EU.

These proposals are opposed by the EPP in the Parliament, the Commission, and many member states, including Germany, Spain and the UK, which fear the plans could jeopardise sensitive data.

Commission proposal

Cashman’s hopes are not helped by his decision to merge the Commission’s 2008 plan with a separate proposal that the Commission presented in March, that too is supposed to amend the EU’s 2001 regulation on access to documents.

In a bid to break the deadlock on the reform, the Commission recommended a limited technical change to the regulation to ensure it abides by the Lisbon treaty, which calls for the public to have a right of access to documents from all EU institutions, bodies, offices and agencies.

The Commission suggested that other changes proposed by Cashman be left for later discussion. This approach is supported by the EPP. Renate Sommer, a centre-right German MEP, called for the Commission’s approach to be endorsed, “given the complexity” of Cashman’s proposal.

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Despite the problems, Cashman remains optimistic that this is the best chance so far to get his proposal adopted, noting that Denmark, which is a strong proponent of transparency, will take over the presidency of the EU’s Council of Ministers in January. “We all need to compromise to serve the needs of the citizen,” he said.