On Tuesday 28 March, European Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, called on the European Commission to urgently address systemic delays in processing access to document requests. Ms O’Reilly believes that fundamental reform is needed to meet the deadlines set out in the EU Transparency Regulation.
The Ombudsman’s investigation revealed that when people ask the Commission to review its initial decision on access (because it has refused or granted partial access to the documents requested), the time limits set out in the 2001 Transparency Regulation are not respected in 85% of cases. More than 60% of these review decisions took more than 60 working days, while the maximum time limit is 30 working days.
Emily O’Reilly acknowledges the growing number and complexity of applications to be processed by the Commission (over 8,000 in 2021). However, in some cases, delays render the information obtained useless for research or journalistic purposes, or prevent citizens from expressing their views at a relevant moment in the decision-making process.
It took the Commission almost 7 months to examine its initial findings in an access case concerning documents related to Poland’s national plan under the ‘Recovery and Resilience Facility’.
Link to the recommendations: https://aeur.eu/f/632 (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)