Brussels, 13/09/2013 (Agence Europe) - On 12 September, the European General Court annulled in part in case T-331/11 a decision by the EU Council of Ministers refusing access for Leonard Besselink, Professor of Constitutional Law in the Faculty of Law of the University of Utrecht (Netherlands), to a draft decision of the Council of the European Union authorising the Commission to negotiate the agreement on the accession of the EU to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR). The document also included the negotiating directives to be complied with by the Commission in its capacity as negotiator for the EU. The Council of Ministers justified its refusal to grant full access to the document (only giving access to a partly declassified version) on the grounds that its disclosure would undermine the protection of the public interest in the field of international relations because the document lays down the EU's strategic objectives, revelation of which would weaken its negotiating position (exceptions to granting public access under Regulation 1049/2001 that applies to such matters). In its ruling, the General Court holds that the Council made a manifest error of assessment in refusing access to Negotiating Directive No 5, relating to accession to additional protocols to the ECHR. The document was communicated to the negotiating partners and it cannot therefore validly be argued that its disclosure would weaken the EU's negotiating position. Furthermore, it contains only the EU's position on the EU's accession to those protocols and does not contain, for example, the position of the EU's negotiating partners, and therefore disclosure of that part of the document cannot jeopardise the negotiations. The Court says that disclosure of details of the other negotiating directives could in fact undermine the public interest as regards international relations and it cannot be precluded that disclosure by the EU, to the public, of its own negotiating positions, when the negotiating positions of the other parties remain secret, could, in practice, have a negative effect on the negotiating capacity of the EU. The General Court therefore partly annulled the Council of Ministers' decision to refuse access to the document. (FG/transl.fl)