Ombudsman calls for more transparency

The European ombudsman has called for the public to have better access to official EU documents.

In a response published on Tuesday (24 July) to the European Commission’s green paper on access to documents Nikiforos Diamandouros says that citizens’ access to documents should be improved in a number of ways.

He notes that while there is a legal right to access to documents held by the EU institutions, the public should have greater rights to information about EU-related activities of member states, as they are responsible for implementation of EU law. The ombudsman notes that the Court of First Instance has ruled that national governments have a veto over whether the EU institutions release documents originating from a member state. He cited a case in 2004 when the International Fund for Animal Welfare lost a case concerning a request to see correspondence between the Commission and Germany over a natural habitat near Hamburg which was reclassified in order to extend an Airbus factory.

But last Wednesday (18 July) the advocate-general of the European Court of Justice said that member states did not have a veto over releasing such documents unless withholding them was justified for reasons of national security or commercial confidentiality. The ombudsman says that member states should have to provide a reason why they wanted documents withheld.

• In a separate decision, the ombudsman has said that the Commission’s practice of blanking out the names of lobbyists in documents released under access to documents rules is unjustified even under data protection and privacy rules. He upheld a complaint brought by the Corporate Europe Observatory, a group campaigning for transparency in lobbying.

The European ombudsman has called for the public to have better access to official EU documents.