Policy Focus

Finnish MEP laments EU move on access to documents

Finnish MEP and former prime minister Anneli Jäätteenmäki has tackled the commission over a revised regulation on access to EU documents.

She told the Parliament Magazine that the EU executive is trying to roll back freedoms given to citizens under a 2001 law.

Because the new regulation redefines the term ‘document’, she says that citizens will actually be restricted in what information they can apply to see.

“Only the final, transmitted version of the document will be listed on the public register of documents, which will encourage policymakers to share information informally so that it will not be subject to public scrutiny,” she wrote in the 13 October edition of the Parliament Magazine.

Under current rules (dating back to 2001), any “content…concerning a matter relating to the policies, activities and decisions falling within the institution’s sphere of responsibility” is open to the possibility of public scrutiny.

However, new rules have become necessary, according to the commission, because of the results of case law and a 2006 council and parliament regulation on applying standards agreed in the Aarhus convention to documents containing environmental information.

The parliament is currently examining the commission’s proposal, and has appointed a rapporteur on the matter, British deputy Michael Cashman. But Jäätteenmäki says that it’s going to be difficult to find agreement between the three institutions on the move.

She says that the council, led by France, Italy and the UK, broadly supports the commission’s plans – but that agreement won’t be so easily reached in parliament, which is due to vote on it in plenary in March next year.

For Jäätteenmäki, it comes down to one thing: citizens must know how decisions are made, especially within the council.

“In all European countries the legislative procedure is open, but not here in the EU,” she told the Parliament Magazine. “In the parliament it is, but not in the council.

“European citizens must know what is behind the decisions that are made and what the opinions of the different nations are in the council. I could understand it if we lived maybe 50 years ago, but now that the EU is an internal market and we have common values, why don’t we release the different opinions of the member states on legislation?”