Strasbourg, 14/03/2001 (Agence Europe) - On 13 March, when addressing two draft recommendations to the Fifteen, following complaints by Statewatch, an organisation fighting for openness and transparency in institutions, Jacob Soderman, European Ombudsman, challenged the EU Council practice of secrecy, that does not respect the rules on access to documents.
The first complaint lodged by Statewatch accuses the EU Council of Ministers of having failed to grant access to certain documents of the "Senior Level Group" and the "EU-US Task Force". Initially, the Council had pointed out that the documents in question had not been prepared under its own responsibility. After the Ombudsman had rejected this argument in June 1998, the Council had claimed that it did not itself hold the documents in question, which were held by the General Secretariat that thus were outside the rules of public access to documents. The Ombudsman considers that the General Secretariat is an integral part of the Council and that it may not be considered to be a separate institution. Consequently, he has addressed a draft recommendation in which he calls on the Council to reconsider access to the documents lodged by the plaintiff.
The second complaint lodged by Statewatch accuses the Council, on the one hand, of not granting access to certain documents submitted at different meetings, and, on the other, of not drawing up a list of all documents submitted at these meetings. One of them concerned police cooperation in communications interception, and the documents used were mentioned in the agendas as Room Documents, non-papers, "SN documents" (sans numéro), etc.. Reacting to this second complaint, the Council declared that the transitional and preliminary nature of these documents meant that it was not necessary that they always be included on the register of documents and made accessible to the citizens. The Ombudsman, on the other hand, considers that the principle of transparency obliges the Council to grant access to all documents, unless it provides specific and valid reasons for not doing so. Furthermore, citizens may have access to documents only if they know that they were taken into consideration by the Council; the Ombudsman therefore considers that the Council should draw up an exhaustive and accessible list of documents. In his draft recommendation, the Ombudsman therefore calls on the Council to reconsider the request for access to documents lodged by the plaintiff and declares that "the Council should draw up a list of all documents presented at Council meetings, list that should be made accessible to the public".
The Council should decide on these recommendations by 31 May and inform the Ombudsman on the way they will be implemented. Commenting on them, Tony Bunyan, Statewatch spokesman, considered that the European Ombudsman had done a great service for democratic standards in the Union, and that the Commission and Council should now withdraw their proposal for a "space to think" that is to be discussed at the next General Affairs Council. He added that officials working for EU institutions were public servants and that their work should therefore be on the public record (subject only to specific and narrow exceptions).