Brussels, 30/05/2016 (Agence Europe) - On Monday 30 May, European Ombudsman Emily O'Reilly explained the reasons prompting her organisation on Friday 27 May to launch a strategic investigation, which will look at how the European Commission assesses the conflicts of interests its own special advisers may potentially encounter.
This investigation, which comes in the wake of individual complaints regarding the objectivity of 40 special advisers to the Commission and, more specifically, the controversial appointment in 2014 of Edmund Stoiber as a special adviser in the framework of the open better regulation' initiative (see EUROPE 11221), aims to make sure that the European rules involve no possibility of inappropriate influence on policy-making by the special advisers to the Commission.
These advisers, who are selected on the grounds of their specific expertise and have privileged access to decision-makers, in some cases also defend specific interests through another professional activity. In order to anticipate any conflict of interests, the European Ombudsman told the press on Monday 30 May that the “mandate of each adviser and his or her activities should be assessed before the appointment, in order to ensure that no conflicts occur”. O'Reilly went on to add that assessments of conflicts of interests “should be updated if the individuals in question accept new activities”.
There are two reasons for making sure that the rules are being complied with. According to the Ombudsman, it is of critical importance that the general public has absolute trust in the selection of the experts and that the experts themselves can have absolute trust in the functioning of the system, “whilst being duly informed of the rules on their appointments”. She added that her investigation would not focus on any individual in particular, but “on the system of special advisers as a whole”.
Transparency register. On Friday 27 May, O'Reilly also wrote to the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, to share her ideas on transforming the current transparency register into a “transparency hub” for all institutions, bodies and agencies of the European Union. Although she welcomed the progress already made by the Commission and the European Parliament with the creation of this register, shortcomings remain. “The register now needs to be reinforced and extended to the Council, so that it can become a genuinely effective tool”, she said. She has made a number of recommendations, including: - total financial transparency from all interest groups; - the disclosure of clients for which law firms carry out lobbying activities; - a register of lobbying activities directly targeting civil servants of the member states; - publication of all meetings held with representatives of the tobacco industry.
The ultimate purpose of the register would be to give as complete an image as possible of how an organisation seeks to influence political decision-makers. The EU transparency register should “reveal not only the amount spent on lobbying purposes, but should also detail the expert group in which an organisation participated, which individuals its representatives met and why”, O'Reilly said. (Original version in French by Didion Maëlle, intern)