Reaping the rewards of transparency

Date: 15/02/1996

NEW figures to be published by the European Commission next month will show that moves towards greater openness and transparency within the EU institutions are finally bearing fruit.

This is to be welcomed. One of the main causes of grass-roots hostility towards the Union is the widespread feeling that too much of the discussion about future EU legislation takes place behind closed doors and that decisions are taken in the public's name without a proper public debate.

While it is the Council of Ministers, rather than Commission, that is the target of most of these attacks, greater openness is essential in all the EU's institutions to dispel such concerns.

But increased transparency should not simply be regarded as a sop to public opinion. The need for greater openness goes much deeper than that. Public access to the documents upon which the EU's institutions base their discussions is vital to ensure all points of view on planned new EU laws are heard before decisions are taken by government ministers.

The suspicion with which lobbyists are viewed by many members of the public is largely unwarranted. Most perform a useful function in pointing up potential pitfalls in proposed legislation, enabling changes to be made, where necessary, at the drafting stage, rather than being left until after new EU laws have reached the statute book.

The Council of Ministers, which currently finds itself in the dock once again at the European Court of Justice over its policy on public access to documents, should follow the example set by the Commission and publish figures showing exactly how many of the internal papers requested by members of the public from its secretariat have actually been released.

Only then will EU citizens be able to decide whether their fears about excessive secrecy are justified.

Both the Commission and Council should also move quickly to establish a register of the hundreds of internal documents circulating in the corridors of power, so that those interested in monitoring developments in a particular sector can chart the progress of specific pieces of legislation both while they are on the drawing board and once they have been handed over to ministers for consideration.

Without such a register, the public faces a classic dilemma: individuals can only apply for access to internal documents in a given area if they know they exist and can specify what it is they are looking for. In the absence of such a register, many potentially important papers risk being overlooked entirely.

While it is true that details of proposals for EU legislation and some policy documents and communications, as well as laws approved by government ministers, eventually appear in the Official Journal, it can take up to six weeks for an item to make its way into the journal's pages - far too long a time-lag, in some cases, to allow for a proper debate on its contents.

Few would deny that some internal documents may genuinely be too sensitive to be placed in the public arena and almost all would support, in principle at least, the idea of having certain categories of papers which can remain under lock and key - provided the rules governing which documents can be held back are not interpreted overzealously.

But, as the Commission's own figures suggest, there is absolutely no reason why the vast bulk of internal reports, documents and draft proposals circulating in the EU's institutions should be kept out of the public gaze.