Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-04-03-Speech-1-138"
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"en.20060403.12.1-138"2
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"Mr President, I wish to begin by congratulating the European Parliament and, of course, the rapporteurs, Mr Mintz and Mr Cashman, for two very important reports. If I may begin by commenting on openness in the Council, the Commission fully supports open meetings of the Council. As early as October, we stated, in plan D, that the Council should be open when it legislates, and we support the initiatives taken by the Council.
I think that recommendation 5 contains quite a few extremely interesting and useful proposals concerning more user-friendly registers and databases. They are proposals requiring no legislation, as they deal with practical details and measures. The interinstitutional committee appointed through the regulation in question last met in November 2005 and decided to appoint a working party to look at those issues, so a solution may be nearer than we think.
To conclude, the Commission is very committed to the issue of public access to documents. We have embarked on an overhaul of the regulation, and we have begun to take a closer look at many of the issues discussed in the report. We hope that the European Parliament will continue to help matters along and we expect great things of the general consultation we shall be carrying out between July and October. Public access to documents is about scrutiny and credibility and, when it comes down to it, democracy. It is therefore important for us to continue to cooperate constructively and for us to listen to the general public.
I am convinced that open meetings of the Council would increase the EU’s credibility, as well as people’s interest in the EU. I know that, in terms of principle, there is a consensus between our institutions on this issue, and it is now the Member States that must take action and deliver results. I also believe that it would be an effective way of putting an end to what we call the ‘blame game’, so this is an important issue.
Openness also has to do with public access to documents and with Regulation 1049/2001. Formally, this legislation applies only to Parliament, the Council and the Commission, but it has, for all that, come to apply to many more bodies. The EU’s various offices and agencies – indeed, most of its bodies – have voluntarily adopted corresponding rules concerning access to documents. Just as the rapporteur, Mr Cashman said, the EU institutions have in this way – and thanks in no small measure, then, to the European Parliament – achieved in a remarkably short period of time a level of openness that is very good indeed compared with that to be found in many Member States.
That is not to say that matters cannot be improved. They can and must be. In 2003, the Commission carried out an investigation into the ways in which the regulation had been introduced in the first few years. In 2004 we published our evaluation report. By then the regulation had only been in force for less than two years, but it had operated well, and there was no immediate need to revise it or any legal obligation to do so, either. That was why the Commission thought it better to wait for the Constitutional Treaty to be ratified before we did anything further. The Constitution requires new legislation in this area.
The fact is, we all know how matters stand with the Constitutional Treaty. Meanwhile, the European Court of Justice has also produced several proposals for introducing rules governing access to documents. The Commission thought that this was now an appropriate moment at which to begin overhauling the regulation, and the decision to do this is part of the broad European transparency initiative, which we in the Commission decided on in November of last year.
Mr Cashman’s report is therefore extremely timely, given that we are in the throes of looking to see how we can improve the rules governing public access to documents. The Commission – including, I can promise you, myself personally – will be looking extremely carefully at the report’s recommendations.
One of the conclusions drawn by the Commission in its evaluation report of January 2004 was that the regulation had primarily been used by EU professionals, lobbyists, consultants and law firms, rather than by the general public. That is something we want to change, and we must do much more to reach out to people. What, in the first place, we are concerned with here is, of course, public access to documents or the public’s right to keep itself informed, and that is a further argument in support of our wanting to see a general consultation take place before we change the legislation. The Commission intends to hold such a consultation between July and October of this year. We shall then put forward a practical proposal at the end of this year or at the beginning of next year.
Without going into the details of the report’s various recommendations, I should simply like to clarify matters in a number of ways. Recommendation 2 talks about increased openness in the legislative procedure and of a clearer dividing line between legislative and administrative documents. The proposal is a very interesting one, at which we shall look closely. The same recommendation also relates to the Official Journal and electronic publication thereof. Our institutions had jointly decided to look at this issue back in 2004, and the Publications Office has already issued a report on the future of the Official Journal.
Recommendation 3 talks about documents classified as confidential. In this area, we must be careful not to confuse different things. Confidentiality does not in itself lead to a general exception to the rule whereby people have the right of access to documents. A refusal to issue a document classified as confidential must be justified in precisely the same way as a refusal to make any other document available. The procedure is the same, and the institution’s obligations are the same. The same recommendation also discusses the issue of the European Parliament’s access to information classified as confidential. Here too we are in danger of confusing matters. Parliament’s rights in this area are controlled not by the regulation but by Annex 1 to the framework agreement between our institutions. In our experience, the framework agreement operates well."@en1
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