The EU’s accession to the Council of Europe Convention on Access to Official Documents would help strengthen transparency’s supportive role of transparency, Miguel Angel Blanes Climent argues.
Tag: 2015
EU transparency in the news, January – March 2015.
See also the news report digests for 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 (second quarter, and second half), and 2014 (last quarter).
The Open Government in the EU blog keeps a regularly updated overview of news reporting on EU transparency since September 2014. This post contains an overview of reports over the first three months of 2015. News reports are collected through quick scans on Google news and the most relevant websites. While this news scan is in no way exhaustive or fully systematic, it does provide a nice overview of the direction that the transparency debate is taking over a period of months.
During the first quarter-year of 2015, EU transparency news focused predominantly on the (lack of) transparency around the TTIP negotiations and the issue of tax transparency sparked by the LuxLeaks scandal. A further item that continued to be debated in 2015 was the regulation and transparency of lobbying activities. A longlist of news reports is provided below.
Suggestions for additions or current news are warmly welcomed, via the twitter account @MZHillebrandt. –MH
See also: news reporting September – December 2014
On 27 February, the General Court of the EU delivered another ruling on the EU right of public access to documents. In case T-118/12 (Breyer v Commission), German Pirate Party member Patrick Breyer (pictured) took action against the Commission’s decision not to grant it access to documents, saying that these documents, being held by the Court, fell outside of the scope of the access law. While the Court ended up ruling otherwise, ACELG PhD Eljalill Tauschinsky points at an element of the case that is problematic nonetheless: the Court’s decision to make Breyer bear half of his own costs, to punish him for publishing documents pertaining to the court case on his website, thereby allegedly inviting readers to comment negatively and exert pressure on the Commission in an ongoing case. While a comparable situation occurred over 15 years ago in the Swedish Journalist Association case, Tauschinsky argues that Breyer was punished worse for a comparable breach.
The comment, posted on the ACELG blog, can be accessed here.
Cross-post van het Expertisecentrum voor Europees Recht (ECER), Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken.
De Commissie mag een verzoek om openbaarmaking van de processtukken van een lidstaat in een infractieprocedure niet automatisch afwijzen omdat het stukken van het EU-Hof zijn. Het besluit om stukken vrij te geven moet worden genomen op basis van de bijzondere regeling in de Eurowob. Dat heeft het EU-Gerecht bepaald.
Het gaat om het arrest van het Gerecht van 27 februari 2015 in de zaak T-188/12, Patrick Breyer tegen de Commissie.
Breyer verzocht de Commissie om vrijgave van de door Oostenrijk bij het EU-Hof ingediende processtukken (memories) in de infractieprocedure die de Commissie tegen Oostenrijk had gevoerd over de implementatie van de dataretentierichtlijn ( zaak C-189/09).
Voor een uitgebreide bespreking van dit arrest zie de ECER-website. -MH