Cloud which may yet have a silver lining

Date: 02/11/1995

Environment Commissioner Ritt Bjerregaard's abortive attempt to publish a diary chronicling her first six months in Brussels may have exposed her colleagues and the institution she works for to public ridicule. But the cloud it cast over the Commission may yet prove to have a silver lining.

Prompted by the furore over the Bjerregaard diary and the questions it raised over what would have happened to any royalties she might have received from book sales, the Commission is finally moving to puts its house in order. The incident has highlighted the fact that while there are clear rules governing what officials may or may not do while employed by the Commission, the rules for Commissioners have until now been shrouded in much more confusion.

The Bjerregaard controversy has forced the Commission to concede that this situation cannot be allowed to continue, casting doubt as it does on whether its most senior members are genuinely “completely independent in the performance of their duties” as Article 157 of the Treaty of Rome insists they must be.

This week's news that Commissioners are set to publish for the first time a new code of conduct laying down clear rules on their outside activities is a welcome step forward. It will do much to enhance transparency inside an institution which has long been criticised as over-secretive.

But Commission President Jacques Santer should go still further and press his colleagues to agree to open up the register of their interests - currently available only to Santer and the Commission's Secretary-General David Williamson - to public scrutiny.

The European Parliament, acknowledging widespread public concern about the vested interests of elected representatives in parliaments across the Union, is already moving to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding its members' outside interests by introducing tough new rules for lobbyists and for MEPs themselves.

Those rules, due to be voted on by the full Parliament before the end of the year, would lead to the setting up of a register of lobbyists and introduce a new requirement for MEPs to declare publicly any gifts in cash or kind worth more than 1,000 ecu they receive from lobbyists.

Parliamentarians are encouraging the Commission to follow suit by threatening to block their travel and subsistence funds for next year unless they are supplied, by mid-December, with details of any payments or expenses received by Commissioners during 1995 for attending events organised by outside bodies or organisations.

Commissioners should not wait to be forced into greater openness about their own affairs by Parliament, but should follow up on the promising start made this week. If they fail to do so, they risk being tarred with the same brush which has tarnished the image of so many politicians across the EU in recent years and fuelled growing public cynicism.