The Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home
Affairs adopted an own initiative report by Marco CAPPATO (ALDE, IT)
on public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents
(implementation of Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001). The report emphasises that the
recent Court of Justice of the European Communities (ECJ) Judgment in the Turco
case further strengthens in the EU the principle by which democratic
institutions have a duty to ensure publicity of their activities, documents
and decisions, which is a condition of their legality, legitimacy and
accountability, and that consequently documents must be published and in any
event accessible and that any exception to this principle should be limited
and interpreted strictly. MEPs call on all EU institutions to apply
Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001 in the light of the recent case-law and notably
of the ECJ Judgment in the Turco case in all its implications, notably in
the legislative procedures (publication of legal service opinions, strict
interpretation of exceptions, obligation to provide a detailed statement of
reasons for refusal, etc). They also call on the Council to review its rules
to ensure publicity of all discussions, documents and information.
MEPs believe that accessing information relating to the
EU institutions still remains an obstacle-strewn path for ordinary citizens
due to the lack of an effective citizen-oriented inter-institutional policy
of transparency and communication. They consider that regardless of the point
of access, EU citizens should be able to track a given legislative or
administrative procedure and access all the documents relating to it. In
this respect, an inter-institutional road-map should be defined to
improve, simplify and complete the EU institutions' registers and web pages
and make them interoperable. The report also regrets that, contrary to what
is provided for in Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001, many preparatory legislative
documents are still not registered (such as the "room documents"
mainly discussed within the Council working groups set up by Coreper 1) and
when registered, they are missing the inter-institutional code so that it has
proved impossible to merge them in a common inter-institutional record. The
EU institutions are called upon to:
- create
a single EU register/portal of information and documents, that
should allow citizens to follow a certain procedure and access all the
documents relating to it;
- define
common rules on the way in which administrative procedures should
be carried out and administrative documents should be tabled,
classified, declassified, registered and disseminated inside and outside
the EU institutions, bearing in mind that the transparency principle is
inseparable from the principle of good administration as proclaimed by
the European Parliament, Council and Commission in Article 41 of the
Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union;
- ensure
that, at least before the beginning of the next Parliamentary term:
(i) all the preparatory documents mention the legislative procedure
reference; (ii) all the agendas and outcome of the proceedings of the
Council and preparatory bodies make clear reference to the background
documents and are registered in good time and published in the Council
Register; (iii) they make clear to citizens in a fair and transparent
way their organisational chart by indicating the remit of their internal
units, the internal workflow and indicative deadlines of the dossier
falling within their remit, to which services should citizens refer to
obtain support, information or administrative redress;
- ensure
improved transparency in relation to comitology procedures, as
well as to first-reading agreements negotiated between EU institutions
in co-decision procedures (so-called "trilogues"), to
make sure that inter-institutional agreements are fully in line with the
duties of publicity, transparency and openness in legislative procedures;
- promote
a common administrative culture of transparency founded on the
principles outlined in Article 41 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights
of the European Union, by the case-law of the ECJ, the recommendations
of the European Ombudsman and the best practices of the Member States;
- work
towards an ambitious European "Freedom of Information Act",
on the basis of the current proposed revision of Regulation (EC)
No1049/2001;
MEPs believe that Parliament should be at the forefront
of publicity, transparency and openness in the EU, and that before the
Parliamentary elections of 2009, it should launch an extraordinary action
plan, for instance within the framework of the e-Parliament initiative, to
ensure that more and easily accessible information is made available on its
website, on:
- MEPs'
activities, participation in and attendance at Parliamentary work, in
absolute, relative and percentage terms, available and accessible to
citizens also through search criteria;
- Parliament's
activities in plenary, committee, delegations and internal bodies (for
example, the Legislative Observatory should be improved by including
references and links to all relevant documents; committee and delegation
work should be streamed on Parliament's website as plenary work is, and
also recorded, and made available and accessible to citizens through search
criteria; internal bodies, such as the Conference of Presidents, the
Bureau, the Quaestors, the Working Party on Parliamentary Reform, etc,
should promote and ensure the highest level of transparency of their work);
- MEPs'
allowances and spending, in conformity with the position taken by the
European Ombudsman.
MEPs call for the
launch of a European Year of Transparency and for a European
transparency campaign to be promoted in 2009 on the occasion of the European elections.