On Wednesday 6 December, the national ambassadors to the EU (Coreper) considered that private interest groups should be able to meet senior officials of the Council of the EU as long as they have first registered on the compulsory transparency register.
The deputy Estonian European affairs minister, Matti Maasikas, said that the agreement would allow the Council of the EU actively to comply with the robust rules of the transparency register, as proposed by the European Commission in September 2016 (see EUROPE 11634).
The member states consider that lobbyists should be on the transparency register in order to be able to meet the Secretary General and Directors General of the Secretariat General of the Council. The Council calls on the member states to set in place similar rules in the event of meetings between private interest groups and senior officials of their Permanent Representation to Brussels, but only when the country holds the rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU. Any meeting with national experts of the Permanent Representations also working at the Council, on the other hand, should remain a matter of national competence, the MEPs consider.
The European Parliament's rapporteur on this dossier, Sven Giegold (Greens/EFA, Germany), criticised the weakness of the agreement, which he feels distils only homeopathic doses of extra transparency into the interactions between diplomats and lobbies. He argues that neither the Secretary General nor the Directors General of the Council really negotiate legislative texts.
Giegold therefore calls for the member states to back the Parliament's position that all meetings between lobbyists and national experts of Permanent Representations should be conditional upon the prior registration of these lobbyists on the transparency register (see EUROPE 11862).
It is worth noting that the Council is proposing the creation of two legislative instruments: a tripartite inter-institutional agreement and individual decisions to be adopted by each of the three European co-legislating institutions. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)