In a statement issued on Tuesday 1 April, the European Commission acknowledged that “in some cases, the work programmes submitted by NGOs and annexed to grant agreements [from the LIFE framework programme] contained specific advocacy activities and inappropriate lobbying activities”.
“To avoid such cases happening again”, the Commission intends to “further strengthen transparency and include appropriate safeguards”, notably in the LIFE 2025-2027 multiannual work programme. NGOs must not use programme subsidies to target “specific policies or MEPs”.
Ways of making EU grant funding more transparent will be examined.
The EPP Group welcomed “this recognition of the problem by the Commission”. “Some Commission officials and NGOs made mistakes”, said German Peter Liese, its spokesperson for the environment. In his view, “it is encouraging that measures have already been taken”.
The previous day, proceedings at Parliament’s Environment Committee had verged on farce when Sander Smit (EPP, Dutch), Piotr Fiocchi (ECR, Italian) and Mathilde Androuët (PfE, French) had to decide whether or not to maintain the two objections (see EUROPE 13602/8) to the Commission’s draft implementing decision on the financing of the LIFE programme and the adoption of the work programme for the years 2025, 2026 and 2027.
The EPP had reached an agreement with the European Commission beforehand. A statement from the Commission was supposed to provide transparency guarantees on the funding of NGOs in the LIFE programme, but the European Commission did not read out the expected statement at the meeting on Monday, while promising that it would be made public the following day.
With the EPP’s plan thrown into disarray and its MEPs caught off guard, Sander Smit twice insisted that the European Commission should read out his statement to MEPs, pointing out that they had “agreed” to do so.
Several EPP MEPs then tried to take the floor, but were not allowed to do so by the Chair of the Environment Committee, Antonio Decaro (S&D, Italian), as this was not a debate.
Among them, Peter Liese, the EPP’s coordinator for the environment, had said a few minutes earlier: “Many colleagues will vote differently [...] if the Commission makes a statement.”
Finally put to the vote, both objections were rejected. The motion tabled by the EPP and ECR received 40 votes in favour, 41 against and 2 abstentions. The number of voters - 83 out of the 89 MEPs on the Environment Committee - spoke volumes about the political nature of this vote, after several months of campaigning by the EPP (see EUROPE 13564/15), the conservative right (see EUROPE 13579/6) and the far right (see EUROPE 13580/12) to put an end to the lobbying of green NGOs financed by LIFE.
The EPP’s Radan Kanev (Bulgarian), Ingeborg Ter Laak (Dutch) and Dimitris Tsiodras (Greek) voted against the objection put forward by their colleague Sander Smit.
The PfE’s objection was also rejected, by 50 votes to 30 with 3 abstentions.
The European Commission has warned that the report will include “recommendations on improving the transparency of NGO funding”. (Original version in French by Florent Servia)