MEP widens debate on openness

Date: 05/09/1996

By Rory Watson

MEPS are stepping up their long-running campaign to inject greater openness into the Union's activities by drawing up concrete suggestions for the reform of existing procedures.

The task of drafting new principles on public access to EU meetings and documents has been given to Danish Europe of Nations MEP Jens-Peter Bonde.

Once agreed by the full European Parliament, these will be fed into the intergovernmental negotiations on the future of the Maastricht Treaty.

“I want to turn the current procedures around. Now everything is secret unless it is allowed to be open. In future, everything should be open, and reasons should be given when that is not the case so there can then be a public debate,” says Bonde.

He has already drafted a number of key criteria which he wants to see included in the revised treaty and is currently canvassing the opinions of national governments, EU officials, journalists' federations and, via the Internet, the general public so that, as he puts it, “the whole world can participate in the debate”.

Under the options for opening up EU meetings currently being considered by the Danish MEP, all proceedings and votes on the adoption of Union legislation would take place in public.

Similarly, Bonde aims to ensure transparency and access to documents by calling for the introduction of a formal right for all EU officials to communicate information.

Any exemption to these general rules would require the approval of a two-thirds majority of those involved.

“I want to make it as difficult as possible to have exemptions. When they are introduced, they must be based on concrete decisions and we must know who supported them and why,” he explains.

“It should also be possible for people to appeal to the European Ombudsman if exemptions are introduced. The Ombudsman should be a basic defender and if he agrees with an individual, he should take up the case.”

The Ombudsman's existing remit would need to be widened to take on such a task, but Bonde believes this move is necessary to prevent individuals from being deterred by the potential financial and administrative hurdles involved in challenging exemptions on their own.

Even if the Ombudsman failed to support such a challenge, members of the public would still be free to take their case to the European Court of Justice.

Drawing on the experience of Sweden - a country which, along with its neighbours in Scandinavia, has a strong tradition of open government - the Danish MEP has proposed seven possible grounds for refusing public access to Union meetings or to internal documentation.

Apart from the protection of national security and personal privacy, these would also cover cases where premature disclosure could affect police investigations, the work of investigatory bodies, or exchange rate or monetary policy.

In addition, exemptions would be justified in areas where specific interests in the EU's relations with third countries or in private or company commercial secrets could be harmed.

But Bonde is adamant that even when a document has been classified as restricted, that status should not necessarily be permanent.

“It should be possible to say that a document is secret up to a certain date because the Union is in a negotiating phase with, say, the United States or Japan. But just because a document is classified as secret for a few months, it does not mean it has to be secret for its whole life,” he argues.

Bonde, who submitted his original thoughts on openness to MEPs a year ago, has already won the unanimous support of the Parliament's institutional affairs committee for the latest draft of his proposals.

He has also received backing from the Euro-Ombudsman Jacob Söderman, who acknowledged earlier this year that major improvements in transparency would only occur if changes were made to the Maastricht Treaty.

In July, Söderman told MEPs that a large number of the 647 complaints he had received since last September were directed at the European Commission and the Council of Ministers, even though both had recently adopted a code of conduct on public access to their documents. The first was criticised for an alleged lack of transparency in refusing access to documents and the second for not handing out the minutes of Council meetings.