Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-10-08-Speech-3-148"
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"en.20081008.20.3-148"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, Madam Vice-President, ladies and gentlemen, I know how attached you are – particularly you, Mr President – to the issues of transparency, and the Presidency is with you on this. It is very important that our citizens can understand how European decisions affecting them are taken – this is the case for European legislation – and we must of course make progress in this area.
In order to improve public access to deliberations, the Council also has a website from which provides a link to the video streaming of Council proceedings, which, as I am sure you will agree, is an important point and a particularly exciting one at that.
The Council presidencies also have a role to play. Like the websites of previous presidencies, the French Presidency has invested a great deal in its website http://www.ue2008.fr"
which is multilingual and has web TV with several channels, similar to the one launched, I am glad to say, by the European Parliament.
The third and final point is that we need to be able to satisfy requests for information from the public. To do this, a public information service has also been created – and it is this point that strikes me as the most important – because the area in which we are least well equipped is doubtless the practical information that we give to the public. This is why citizens have a right to be concerned and why they complain that the system is too opaque. This is because we have inadequate resources and websites that are not coordinated enough and do not allow the public to stay up to date on legislation. It is on this last point that the Council must focus its efforts.
These are the points that I wanted to make. Transparency is absolutely key. We have reached an important agreement on communication with the Commission and European Parliament with a view to increasing this transparency, and it is my belief that the interinstitutional negotiations that we had with Mrs Wallström and with the Vice-President of the European Parliament allow us to go forward under the best possible conditions.
This is a collective task and we must now make sense of it. Bear in mind that we have a political ambition to further this transparency, in the information and communication policy, particularly in terms of the practical information about legislation that must be given to citizens. To do this, we must make greater use of new information technologies. I know that this is a concern that is shared by Parliament, by the Commission and by the Council.
I welcome your question because it allows us to examine the difficult subject of public access to legal opinions. This is the subject of the judgment, but our entire transparency policy must be assessed in the light of this judgment.
The Turco judgment is important because it is the first time that the Court of Justice has ruled on individual cases, as you said, of legal opinions and the conditions of their access by the public. In its judgment, the Court issues a reminder of the importance of the openness and transparency of the legislative process to allow citizens to be more involved in decision-making. It also concludes that Regulation 1049/2007 on public access to documents in principle imposes an obligation to disclose the opinions of the institution’s legal service relating to the legislative process.
To answer your question, Mr Cappato, the Council took the necessary measures to enforce this Court judgment in early July 2008. The Council executed the judgement and made the document requested by Mr Turco public. It then decided to adapt its practices to the Court judgment, taking into account this principle as laid down in the judgment.
It is true that there are exceptions – although it was the Court itself that defined them in the context of this judgment – concerning opinions that are particularly sensitive or have a particularly wide scope. In any event, as you know, any refusal of the Council must be substantiated.
The Council has received a number of specific requests relating to the legal opinions of the Council’s legal service, and has applied the Court’s principles. That said, you will not be ignorant of the fact that public disclosure of the internal legal opinions of an institution can affect the legitimate interest of the institutions to request and receive objective and independent opinions. We need to find a balance between the two. This is why the legislator was explicitly keen to protect the confidential nature of legal opinions, and this is a factor that remains in our opinion.
I recognise that these are very technical responses, and I apologise for that. However, these are the official answers given on behalf of the Presidency. Aside from that, I now have an opportunity to review the transparency policy. We need to distinguish between several aspects of this policy. First of all, in terms of direct access to working documents – this is the point of your question – I can confirm that the Council fully applies the provisions of Article 12 of Regulation 1049/2001 and Annex II of the Council Rules of Procedure, which requires a public register to be kept and specifies the arrangements for direct access to Council documents by the public.
I do not wish to bore you with too much technical information or too many figures. However, the fact remains that the figures tell a story, since the register made available to the public contains references to more than a million documents produced since 1999. You will no doubt tell me that quantity does not mean quality.
It seems to me that what matters is the readability and mediatisation of decisions taken by institutions. This is what Mrs Wallström is working on in the context of the legislative procedure, and the inter-institutional agreement on better lawmaking includes general commitments on transparency. Measures have already been taken under this agreement. All Council deliberations within the framework of the codecision procedure are open to the public and the Council regularly holds public debates on important issues that concern the interests of the EU and its citizens."@en1
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