The European Ombudsman, P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, has called on the European Parliament (EP) to defend citizens’ right of access to EU documents in the face of the European Commission’s proposals to revise the law on public access to documents.
The regulation is the same law invoked by MaltaToday on its request for the disclosure of the full accounts of how MEPs spend the money granted to them by the European Parliament.
The request has been upheld by the European Ombudsman, but the European parliament has resisted the Ombudsman’s recommendation and denied MaltaToday access.
“The Commission’s proposals would mean access to fewer, not more, documents. This raises fundamental issues of principle about the EU’s commitment to openness and transparency,” Diamandouros said.
He invited the EP to actively use its role as co-legislator to ensure a successful reform of the current rules.
In 2007, more than a quarter of the Ombudsman’s investigations concerned lack of transparency in the EU administration, including the refusal to disclose documents or information.
“The Commission’s proposals not only ignore the lessons of the past, but also the new promises to citizens, civil society and representative associations made in the Treaty of Lisbon,” Diamandouros said.
The main retrogressive proposals are: restricting the right of public access to legislative documents only; and the definition of a document, which would mean that if a document is not registered as a “document” by an official, then it does not exist.
The Commission’s new amendment removes the principle that documents should be “as far as possible” directly accessible to the public in electronic form, and limits the commitment to give direct access to legislative “acts”. But as to the thousands of other documents such as policy and strategy documents, there is a vague commitment as to whether these are to be made available.
Even more outrageous is the amendment to allow each institution to decide for itself “which other categories of documents are directly accessible to the public”.
The proposal even seeks to redefine a “document” as existing only if it has been sent to recipients or circulated within the institution and entered in the institutions’ records. The amendment is deemed dangerous as it would mean that documents can be left deliberately unregistered by officials so as to put them outside the scope of the law.

mvella@mediatoday.com.mt