Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-03-15-Speech-3-240"
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"en.20000315.7.3-240"2
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".
Mr President, it is possible to keep track of the Council’s work by means of the monthly reports prepared by the General Secretariat of the Council and which are published on the Council’s web site, covering legislative and non-legislative acts approved since January 1999 and including the results of votes, explanations of vote and statements for the minutes when the Council is acting in its legislative capacity.
In the case of definitive legislative acts approved by the Council, the reports include the results of any votes, and any statements for the minutes made by the Council, the Commission and the Member States. However, the only authentic texts are, of course, definitively approved minutes from which extracts are published by the General Secretariat of the Council on the Internet via the EUDOR web site, which is managed by the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, under “Transparency of the Council’s legislative activities”. This is in fact one of the achievements of the much maligned Treaty of Amsterdam which people need to be regularly reminded about.
After each meeting of the Council, a press release is issued which contains information on decisions taken by the Council. This indicates for which decisions statements for the minutes were authorised for release to the public and which are obtainable from the Press Service. It is also possible to obtain information on the legislative transparency of the Council by e-mail.
The public’s right of access to Council documents is covered by Article 255 of the Treaty, which stipulates that the Council shall determine general principles and limits for exercising this right within two years of the entry into force of the Treaty of Amsterdam. It should be borne in mind that this provision of the Treaty of Amsterdam makes it possible for the various institutions to regulate access to their own documents, and we need to be aware of this, given the particularly delicate nature of certain issues under discussion in highly sensitive fields, such as the common foreign and security policy and justice and home affairs. These provisions need to reflect a number of concerns which, whilst preserving the rules of transparency, cannot be allowed to turn transparency into a means of making any Council activity totally ineffective. For this reason, as I have already said, this article stipulates that the rules of procedure of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission should contain specific provisions regarding access to their documents. This issue comes under the general transparency rules of the European institutions which were, in fact, defined in the conclusions of the last European Council, in Helsinki, and I quote, as “an important element in bringing the Union closer to its citizens and improving efficiency”.
During the Finnish presidency, substantial progress was made in the field of access to documents by means of modern information technology, and in particular the Internet. Furthermore, a Council Decision on improving the provision of information relating to the Council's legislative activities and the public register of Council documents was approved. In accordance with this decision, and let me quote once again, “The General Secretariat of the Council shall make accessible to the public a list of the items on the provisional agendas of meetings of the Council and its preparatory bodies referring to cases where the Council acts in its legislative capacity”. The current presidency has been following this practice.
The decision stipulates that the public register of Council documents shall also include references to the document number and the subject matter of classified documents, with the exception of cases where disclosure of this information could undermine protection of the public interest, protection of the individual and of privacy, protection of commercial and industrial secrecy, protection of the Community's financial interests, and/or protection of confidentiality as requested by the natural or legal person who supplied any of the information contained in the document or as required by the legislation of the Member State which supplied any of that information.
From the outset, the Portuguese presidency has declared its commitment to initiate discussions on public access to documents and its intention to entrust this dossier to the “Friends of the Presidency” group as soon as the Commission presented the proposal for a regulation on public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents. This proposal was presented to the Commission, in the College of Commissioners, on 26 January, and, as I have said, it attempts to fulfil the objectives of increasing transparency, and in particular proposes significant amendments to the 1999 Code of Conduct. The presidency immediately initiated discussion of the proposal, which was presented at the Coreper meeting on 2 February and which was examined at two subsequent meetings. This set of tasks has therefore, Mr President, been developed by the Council on the basis of Commission proposals which I believe suggest a real will to increase the transparency of this work."@en1
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