Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-10-27-Speech-4-047-000"
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"en.20111027.5.4-047-000"2
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".
Mr President, I really appreciate all the interventions. I would like to ask you a favour, Mr President. Could you pass to two Members of this Parliament my answers, as they have left the room? One is Mr Chountis, who mentioned that the Commission has an old-fashioned view on democracy. I do not buy that, and I think that the opposite is true. Certainly, talking about my colleague Maroš Šefčovič, he is very active and he is in close cooperation with the Ombudsman, so no old-fashioned views at all.
I am not saying that we cannot just do more, but that is at stake. I really agree with Ms Mazzoni, who made a statement that is closer to reality, talking about good faith and goodwill. The other issue that is quite interesting: Mr Migalski made a remark about freedom of the media, and I have good news for him. Just ten days ago I set up a high-level group for the freedom of the media and pluralism and asked them to produce a report within a year, and I am certain that we will be back in Parliament with that report. By the way, ‘high-level’ in this context really means high-level. The Chair is taken by Ms Vīķe-Freiberga, the former President of Latvia, and the group includes Ms Herta Däubler, the former Justice Minister of Germany; Professor Maduro, the former Advocate-General of the European Court of Justice; and Ben Hammersley, a very famous journalist. So I am looking forward to that result, and I am certain that the honourable Member and his colleagues will also be interested.
Just a couple of remarks about the lack of transparency of the Commission which a couple of your honourable Members have touched on. I got that message; I do not agree. The Commission thoroughly examines all the inquiries addressed to it by the Ombudsman: there can be no doubt about that. The Commission grants requests for access to documents in more than 80% of cases. In only 2% of cases the applicant makes a confirmatory application, and these applications (which is quite remarkable) are generally made by law firms. Speaking about my former life, my experience of law firms is that they are very constructive and also very active, and this is a diplomatic way of saying what is at stake. NGOs and lobbyists are also quite active in that field.
The main reason – and I would like you to pay attention to this – for refusing access to documents is to protect ongoing investigations and the commercial interests of economic operators. These are legitimate interests which may prevent disclosure of documents. So this is not a lack of transparency; it reflects the need to strike the right balance between countervailing interests.
On the subject of the deadlines laid down in Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001, a significant number of requests – particularly those made by law firms (to mention them again: after all, this is their bread and butter) and NGOs – concern large volumes of documents or complete files of tens of thousands of pages, and I have experience with that. These are truckloads of documents, so to say. All those documents must be assessed before a decision on disclosure can be taken, and it is quite obvious that such an analysis cannot be completed within the timeframes of the regulation I mentioned before."@en1
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