Strasbourg, 18/12/2001 (Agence Europe) - European Ombudsman Jacob Söderman welcomed the resolution adopted last week in Strasbourg by the European Parliament on its Special Report concerning the "Bavarian Lager" affair, as being a "victory for transparency". Adopting the report by the British Green member, Jean Lambert, the Parliament called on the Commission to provide Andrew Ronnan with the information that it had hitherto refused to divulge under the pretext of complying with the directive on data protection.
Mr Ronnan had requested, on behalf of the Bavarian Lager Company, that he should receive the names of the persons invited by the Commission to a meeting in order to give their opinions and advice on the complaint that he had filed with the Commission on the subject of British laws regarding purchases of beer, laws that he considered incompatible with European competition law. Mr Ronnan had not been authorised to take part at the meeting. He also asked to be given the names of persons who had made written comments at the Commission concerning his complaint. The Commission maintained that, according to the Directive on data protection, it should keep these names secret, unless the persons concerned agreed to allow their identity to be made known on a bad interpretation of the Directive, the European Parliament has asked the Commission to send the names of the people to Mr Ronnan. In order to ensure that the rules for preventing this data from being used for other purposes, they also recommended that model codes of conduct be set up.
Whilst welcoming the European Parliament Resolution, Mr Söderman declared that the European institutions ought to reach decisions that are as transparent as possible. He also said that the Commission had wrongly attempted to base the Directive on data protection in order to keep information secret, in a way that fails to meet its responsibilities as Guardians of the Treaties. He hoped that the Commission would not try and misrepresent the objective of the data protection regulation again by using the pretext of non-transparency in its activities.