The Commission has presented a report concerning the application in 2003 of Regulation 1049/2001/EC regarding public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents.
During 2003, each of the three institutions published an initial annual report concerning the application of the Regulation.
The present report starts by outlining the measures introduced or finalised in 2003 in order to ensure that the Regulation is applied in full. The first three chapters cover various regulatory amendments in succession, the development of registers and the results of interinstitutional cooperation.
A fourth chapter examines requests for access, the percentage of requests refused and the reasons for these refusals.
The fifth chapter deals with the complaints submitted to the Ombudsman and the sixth gives a description of the state of case law.
The statistics on the processing of requests for access are included in the Annex. The tables show the figures for the two years in which the Regulation has been in force.
Finally, it should be borne in mind that the statistics relate only to requests for access to unpublished documents and do not cover either orders for public documents or requests for information.�