Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-12-14-Speech-3-330-000"
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"en.20111214.26.3-330-000"2
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"Madam President, public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents is an important right for citizens and it is our responsibility to make such access as broad and as easy as possible. At the same time, we are the guardians of other fundamental rights, such as the privacy of individuals or the protection of intellectual property rights. None of these rights can claim precedence over the others, and we must protect them all; therefore, our institutions have the responsibility to strike the right balance amongst sometimes competing interests. Our proposal from 2008 reflects this delicate balance.
From our experience, however, the regulation is regularly misused by lobbyists or law firms with a view to obtaining information serving their own private interests. As these requests mostly concern very voluminous files – 50 000 pages is not an exception – the Commission considers that the handling of such requests is excessively resource-consuming, with no added value for citizens. Therefore, the Commission proposes some clarification to the scope of the regulation. These proposals would not affect legitimate requests and our estimates would not impact on the numbers of the requests granted. They are aimed at better protecting public resources and a well functioning administration, but they have now been simply removed from the report with no clear justification.
Finally, a substantial number of amendments concern provisions of the regulation which the Commission did not propose to amend. We are not adopting a new regulation but amending an existing one, using recasting. I simply recall that the scope for substantive changes open to the legislator is bound to follow those parts included in the Commission’s proposal. Such is the agreement between the three institutions on recasting, which dates from 2003.
To sum up, the Commission will look carefully at the amendments that will be voted by this Parliament but, let me be very clear, many cannot be accepted by the Commission.
Though disappointed by the lack of progress so far, I hope that a real constructive dialogue can take place between the three institutions after the vote, with a view to reaching an agreement. I would also like to repeat what I have said on previous occasions. The regulation is part of the EU policy on transparency but we can do a lot beyond formal legislation: we can improve registers; we can improve user-friendliness and accessibility; we can be more active in dissemination and documents can be published faster. I can bring some more examples. The real objective of transparency is to bring our institutions closer to citizens through an active policy of informing them and making them aware of how Europe-wide policies are elaborated and may affect their daily lives.
I look forward to the constructive and thought-provoking discussions to come. The subject deserves it and our citizens are entitled to expect a clear and well-functioning legislation on public access to our documents.
Two-and-a-half years ago, we discussed the first report presented by rapporteur Mr Cashman. At that time, the European Parliament decided not to vote on the draft legislative resolution and to refer the report back to the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. Regrettably, no real progress was made since, despite my standing offer to have a genuine dialogue on the core elements of our proposal.
In the meantime, the Lisbon Treaty has entered into force and required adjustment to the 2008 Commission proposal. This was duly highlighted in our communication on the consequences for pending proposals of the entry into force of the Treaty, where we suggested that these adjustments were included in the ongoing legislative process.
As there was no progress, the Commission decided in March this year to submit a separate proposal with a view to making the current regulation compliant with the new Treaty. Let me be very clear. The extension of the scope to all institutions, bodies, offices and agencies is a legal obligation under the Treaty and therefore should not be controversial. This is why I have suggested a swift and separate discussion on this rather technical amendment, leaving the door open for further discussions on other changes to the regulation.
I regret that this pragmatic and constructive two-step approach has not been followed by the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs and that the report we are discussing today actually merges the two Commission proposals. This means that the implementation of the legal obligations under the Treaty, the actual creation of a new right for citizens, is now being postponed until the three institutions agree on full-scale review of the regulation.
In the meantime, citizens will have no full, formal access to documents coming, for example, from the European Council or the External Action Service. This agreement risks taking time and I am afraid that, given the amendments proposed in the report, agreement on changes to the regulations is not within reach. I cannot, of course, anticipate the position the Council will take on the proposed amendments but many of them cannot be accepted by the Commission.
Firstly, and because the Lisbon Treaty has extended the principle of access to documents to all institutions, bodies, agencies and offices of the EU, any common set of rules needs to feed a greater number of bodies with very different mandates and competences and this requires a sufficient degree of flexibility.
The proposed amendments do not go, however, in this direction and some of the amendments would even significantly weaken the protection of legitimate interests. For example: no exception to refuse access would apply to legislative documents. It means we would need to grant access to early drafts of legislation and to legal opinions. The institutions would simply have no space to think. This is going too far in our view and we cannot rule out the need to protect a document at least temporarily.
Another example concerns non-legislative documents where legal advice would no longer be protected if the rapporteur’s amendments are carried through. Finally, it would also be impossible to protect personal data or sensitive documents after 30 years. Besides protecting legitimate interests and a space to think, we must also ensure that the regulation is used to disclose documents to the public in the public interest, and I would underline and repeat: in the public interest. This is its ultimate objective."@en1
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