Campaign to lift Council’s veil of secrecy

Date: 30/05/1996

SOCIALIST Euro MPs are preparing to step up their campaign to end some of the secrecy surrounding the Council of Ministers' activities.

They aim to use a conference in mid-June to highlight the obstacles which MEPs encounter when trying to exert democratic control over EU policy-making and to draw attention to the public's difficulties in gaining access to Council documents.

Martin Schulz, the Socialist group spokesman on civil liberties who is organising the conference on 13 June, has set out three main objectives for the day-long meeting.

“We want to make clear that in the relationship between the Union's institutions, it is always the Council of Ministers which acts as the secret service. Even when national parliaments or governments consider documents should be available to the public, the Council tends to insist they remain secret,” he says.

Secondly, Socialist Euro MPs want to underline that it is not just the media, but also EU parliamentarians themselves who are refused documents by the Council to which they think they are entitled.

“The Council of Ministers is not respecting the Maastricht rules. In the field of justice and home affairs where matters like civil liberties are dealt with, the Council does not respect Article K6 which provides that the Parliament must be informed on all important issues. What happens now is that the Council decides on what is important or not,” complains Schulz.

Underlining the Parliament's frustration, he cites a recent case where the Council refused to make a draft of the data protection convention available to MEPs on the grounds that it was still confidential.

In contrast to the institution's secrecy, a German Land which had previously received a copy from the country's federal government provided Euro MPs with a version of the text.

The Parliament complains that there are many other aspects of sensitive policy areas, such as immigration, visas, asylum and police cooperation, on which MEPs are not kept fully informed by member states.

The third aim of the conference, which will also hear from journalists who have tried to gain access to internal Council documents, is to develop a strategy which can highlight the need for greater openness in Union business at the Intergovernmental Conference.

Schulz himself believes the most efficient way to improve existing practice is for the major European institutions to agree among themselves what kinds of documents and information should be routinely available to the public and those which should be treated as secret.

But even this second category would not be hidden from public scrutiny for years on end.

“They would be made available when the institution involved agreed to do so. But it would be ridiculous to think you can keep something secret for a very long time when you have got a structure such as we have in Brussels,” argues Schulz.

The idea for the conference emerged from a meeting between Socialist group leader Pauline Green and Swedish Justice Minister Laila Freivalds, whose government has taken a leading role in trying to extend the public's right to information and access to internal EU documents.