An article by TrUE researchers Maarten Hillebrandt and Päivi Leino-Sandberg was recently published in the Journal of European Public Policy. The publication analyses the role played by the European Ombudsman and the Court of Justice in overseeing the fulfillment of transparency obligations in trilogue negotiations.
Recent cases at the Court of Justice on Regulation 1049/01 on public access to Parliament, Council and Commission documents set new limits to confidentiality in the Council’s legislative and international negotiations, as Vigjilenca Abazi and Maarten Hillebrandt argue in their recent case note article entitled “The legal limits to confidential negotiations: Recent case law developments in Council transparency: Access Info Europe and In ‘t Veld”, published in the Common Market Law Review.
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
The Council of the European Union defends its appeal in Luxembourg. On Thursday 21 February, the litigating parties in the Access Info Europe case appeal convened at the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg for a hearing. This marks the next step in this case, since the the Council contested the General Court’s ruling by bringing an appeal.
The GC’s 2012 judgement in Access Info Europe caused a stir by affirming the NGO’s assertion that citizens need to be able to attribute policy positions to member states in order to participate meaningfully in European democracy. The practice by the Council to disclose arguments put forward without revealing their originating member states had been in place for some years before AIE challenged it. It is seen by the Council as an acceptable compromise between the requirements of democratic participation and those of effective decision-making. Ironically, Access Info Europe was in the process of mapping member state positions in the reform of the access to documents regulation for a report that it was writing, when it stumbled upon this practice.