Luxembourg, 06/12/2001 (Agence Europe) - The Court of Justice has confirmed the ruling of the EU Court of First Instance (CFI) which annulled the Council's decision refusing Heidi Hautala MEP access to a report on arms exports drawn up by a working party in the framework of the common foreign and security policy (CFSP), says a Court press release. "The Court held that the Decision 93/731 (relating to public access to Council documents) neither requires the Council nor expressly prohibits it from considering whether partial access to documents may be granted. It pointed out that the public must have the widest possible access to the documents held by the Commission and Council and rejected the Council's argument that Decision 93/731 concerns only access to 'document' as such, not to the items of information contained in them". Finally, "the Court considered that the Court of First instance was entitled to hold that the principle of proportionality obliges the Council to consider partial access to a document containing items of information whose disclosure would endanger one of the interests protected by Decision 93/731". Furthermore, refusal to partial access would be a disproportionate measure to ensure the protection of elements of information covered by the exceptions to the decision. The protective aims pursued by the Council in refusing access to the report could have been attained even if the Council had confined itself to censoring the passages in the report which could harm international relations, the press release concludes.