Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-01-13-Speech-2-243"
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"en.20090113.26.2-243"2
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"Mr President, I wish to begin by thanking you for a very well-written and interesting report, and I congratulate the rapporteur. This is an important and cherished subject, particularly in times of the revision of Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001 and also bearing in mind the changes that the Treaty of Lisbon – if it enters into force – will bring about on these important issues.
This, unfortunately, will not happen overnight, but has to be worked on. We always take into account the need to increase the coverage of the public register, and I hope you also know my personal commitment to this. We acknowledge that we still have to increase the coverage of our public registers and we confirm our commitment to develop the public registers in the interests of enhanced transparency.
In the resolution you target the questions of document management and a common portal and the Trans-Jai project. The Commission supports the idea of setting up a common portal in order to facilitate access for citizens to legislative documents. I think this would entail a common methodology, and we have to look at all the practical consequences of that on document identification and references. We would like to see a portal that could entail the full availability of public documents for each institution, so we are willing to work together with you on that.
On the Trans-Jai project, I come back to what I said in a reply in October, that this is expected to be open to the general public by 2010.
Let me also comment on the issue of exchange of information between the institutions. I understand what is meant there and what you are after, but I wish to remind you that between our institutions we already have an established working method with the exchange of confidential information held by the Commission and this is regulated in an annex to the framework agreement. We should also keep in mind that the question of sharing information between institutions is not related to public access and we think that this should be handled separately, as it is currently.
This report and the debate is also a valuable and appreciated input for another time when we can discuss it on a broader scale. I am grateful for Parliament’s efforts to keep the issue of transparency and openness high on the EU agenda. We will come back to many of these questions in the very near future, for instance during the joint meeting of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs with the Czech Parliament next week which I shall have the pleasure to attend, and then in just a couple of weeks we will be dealing with the important issue of revising Regulation 1049/2001.
I think the discussions should not end there. We need to be open about transparency and think also what we can do proactively outside the formal legislation, such as on improved registers, on greater user-friendliness and accessibility, active dissemination and quicker publication of documents. Something that I myself did last year was to make the register of my own correspondence directly accessible on the web. I am sure that you all have similar ideas and examples of what can be done if we just put our minds to it. So let us do that.
This report is in principle about the implementation of Regulation 1049/2001 and, therefore, let me start by recalling one of the positive elements in the implementation of the regulation because, as the quantitative data show and as the Parliament report acknowledges, the EU institutions have granted access to a higher number of documents while registering a decrease in the number and rate of refusals.
We are committed to continuing to enhance transparency and openness. Quite naturally, some of the recommendations made in the report go well beyond the application of Regulation 1049/2001 in 2006 and some are not directly related to the activities of the Commission, as we have just heard.
The report addresses a number of issues concerning openness and communication with citizens, and I particularly welcome that as a valuable input for a general reflection on transparency, communication and outreach.
Let me just briefly go through some of the recommendations and the principles underpinning them, because they deserve due consideration.
On the Turco case, I can assure you that the Commission takes this judgment fully into account. As has been said, it mainly concerns the need for increased openness where the Council acts in its legislative capacity, but it is also applicable to the Commission and all the institutions, and the Commission makes sure that each request for access is carefully assessed on a case-by-case basis against the parameters set by the Court of Justice.
Secondly, the proposal to lay down common rules on administrative procedures requires more reflection because many of these procedures are very specific in nature and unique, in some cases, for every institution. This means that we will need some more time to see how that could be done.
The recommendation to merge Regulation 1049/2001 and Regulation (EEC, Euratom) No 354/83 on the opening of the historical archives is quite complex for a particular reason, because Article 255 of the EC Treaty and Regulation 1049/2001 do not apply to all institutions and bodies. This might also change if and when the Lisbon Treaty enters into force, because it will then extend the right of access to documents to all institutions and bodies. This is why it is not so easy to simply merge the two, because the coverage is different.
On the Ombudsman’s critical remark regarding the Commission’s public registers, I would like to assure you that we take this remark very seriously. As you know, we have a public register of documents that has been up and running since June 2002 and since then the Commission has also put in place a dedicated register for comitology procedures and a register on expert groups. We are always doing our utmost to modernise our internal IT systems."@en1
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