IGC negotiators fail the transparency test

Date: 04/07/1996

By Ole Ryborg

ONE of the key questions facing negotiators around the Intergovernmental Conference table as they search for ways to bring the EU closer to its citizens is how to put more flesh on the bones of the much-vaunted principles of transparency and openness.

Yet while many member states pay lip-service to the notion of making the Union's institutions more accessible to the public, most of their representatives at the IGC talks are failing to practise what they preach.

Their reluctance to do so emerged when European Voice asked the Council of Ministers to hand over 20 documents relating to the IGC negotiations. The Council replied that the documents in question were not covered by the provisions of its own rules on access to documents, and it was up to the IGC negotiators to decide whether to release them or not.

When the issue was discussed at a recent dinner, foreign ministers' representatives at the IGC talks turned down the request.

In a letter explaining the decision, Silvio Fagiolo, who chaired the negotiations before handing the baton over to Irishman Noel Dorr this week,

said: “When the Intergovernmental Conference discussed practical arrangements concerning its organisation and, notably, the status of its documents, the possibility of the conference making these documents available to the public was not envisaged.

“Following your request, this point has been confirmed. Therefore, regrettably I have to inform you that I am not able to send you the documents in question.”

Sources suggest that Fagiolo's reply deliberately avoided classifying the documents involved as secret in order to cover the fact that member states are taking different approaches to the issue.

While Denmark has argued for the full publication of all such documents since the start of the IGC discussions, France has been at the forefront of the campaign to block any such move.

And while most participants in the IGC talks are keeping contributions to the negotiations secret, two Nordic countries with a long-standing tradition of open government - Denmark and Sweden - are making all such documents available to the public on request.

In Copenhagen, IGC papers are sold to the public by the EU information office in the Danish parliament and its law shop. Both charge a nominal fee of just 0.7 ecu for each request, plus 0.03 ecu for every four pages copied.

The Danes do not only sell copies of IGC documents from the presidency, but also make national contributions to the negotiations available to the public.

In a recent advertisement published in a Danish magazine, France's proposal for the appointment of a high representative to act as the 'public face' of the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy and its submission on the role of national parliaments, as well as German proposals for an independent cartel office, were offered for sale.

Sweden has a similar record of openness when it comes to IGC texts, although when the talks were launched at the Turin summit in March this year, it initially decided to keep such papers secret.

It was only after an article appeared in the Swedish press revealing that the Danes were making them available to the public that Swedish negotiator Gunnar Lund decided to do the same.

Lund took his original stand after Danish negotiator Niels Ersbøll said at the start of the IGC talks that his country would not publish the documents - a statement which was strictly accurate since Denmark as a state does not actually sell or publish them. They are, in fact, automatically made available to the public when they are handed over to the Danish parliament by the Copenhagen foreign ministry.