EU Watchdog Criticizes Lack of Transparency in Brussels

The European Union is not clear and open, and is getting worse, according to its own transparency watchdog. New proposals on document access are a “step backwards,” European Ombudsman Nikiforos Diamandouros said at a hearing in the European Parliament on Monday.

“The Commission’s proposals would mean access to fewer, not more, documents,” said Diamandouros, who oversees EU citizens’ relations with the European institutions. “This raises fundamental issues of principle about the EU’s commitment to openness and transparency.”

He went on to say that he could not “identify any of the Commission’s proposals that would result in more documents being accessible than at present.”

Diamandouros is not the only person to criticize the proposals. “The Commission says this will improve transparency. I find it difficult to find improvements here; it’s almost the other way round,” Swedish Justice Minister Beatrice Ask said.

“At a stroke the new area of openness and transparency promised in the Amsterdam Treaty will be dealt a fatal blow, and we will be back in the age of the ‘dinosaurs,’” said Statewatch, a charity that monitors civil liberties in Europe.

The European Parliament is examining three main proposals dealing with the EU’s transparency toward its citizens and the world. The first is that only papers that have been formally sent to people or are otherwise registered can be classified as documents. According to the EUobserver, this means “that the Commission will effectively decide what documents are covered by the new law.” If the Commission doesn’t want people to know what a paper says, it will simply choose not to recognize it as a document.

The second proposal is that documents about “natural or legal persons” involved in an investigation should never be made available to the public.

The third is that in the period before a formal Commission decision is made, all related documents should be rendered inaccessible. The effect of the proposal, according to Diamandouros, would be to “give the Commission discretion to share documents informally with a limited number of favored external recipients of its choice”—without ever making them available to the public.

All these proposals would result in more EU documents being kept secret than under current laws.

And the EU is not exactly known for its transparency as it is. Only a few months ago, the European Parliament refused to release an auditor’s report on the abuse of expenses. The report was only made available to a few members of the European Parliament, who had to enter a secret room and pledge not to take notes or talk about it.

The EU is neither an open nor a democratic organization. Its secretive and corrupt nature goes back for decades. For more information on the EU’s dark side, read our recent article “This Rotten Heart of Europe.”