Open Government in the EU

Today, 97 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) submitted a letter to Finnish government which will take up the rotating EU Council Presidency as of 1 July, urging it to make lobby transparency a central theme in its policy agenda.

The letter, written by prominent transparency proponents and MEPs charged with transparency policy questions (including Heidi Hautala, Danuta Hübner, and Sylvie Guillaume), was signed by MEPs from various political groupings, including the Social Democrats, the Christian Democrats, and the Greens. It calls on Finland’s Prime Minister Juha Sipilä, to address the opacity of Council decision making, which an accompanying press release describes as “a veritable ‘black box’ which has been lagging far behind the Parliament and Commission on transparency provisions”.

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Dutch Prime Minister Rutte welcomes Commission President Juncker to Amsterdam, while the other members of the Commission cue up. The welcoming ceremony is one of the rare occasions that the public will be able to view during the Commission’s visit to the Netherlands.

The European Commission will meet the Dutch chambers of parliament behind closed doors, at the latter’s request.

Yesterday, the European Commission arrived in the Netherlands for a series of meetings at the opening of the Dutch EU Presidency that last for the first half of 2016. An opening ceremony, including the taking of the traditional group photo, took place at Amsterdam’s stately Museum of Maritime History.

This official reception however appears to be a rare public occasion during the Commission’s stay in the Netherlands.

Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad today reported that the debate between the Dutch States-General (combining both the lower and the upper houses of parliament) and the European Commission, scheduled to take place today, will take place behind closed doors.

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The Cyprus presidency has entered the EU transparency battlefield.

In an earlier post on this blog, I commented how the Danish presidency, in a race against the clock in the final weeks of June, failed to find a compromise on the transparency reform dossier that found sufficient support among both the member states and the European Parliament. (The latter having shown, over the years, much assertiveness in the area of what is known among lawyers as constitutional law, and among political scientists as oversight or meta-regulation.) The Danes failed miserably – its draft proposals for either a medium- and a light-version of a reformed Transparency Regulation were torpedoed and were criticised by transparency-friendly parties as a sell-out.

As of 1 July, Cyprus has taken over the presidency. From the early start, the Cypriots have shown a keenness to revive the talks and to start a fresh search for political compromise. A team under the experienced (and nicely-named) Cypriot senior diplomat Dionysis Dionysiou has enbarked on a new reconnaissance mission in bilateral talks to gauge the temperature among the various parties involved, bothinside among the Council members, and outside among the co-legislating EP and groups from civil society.

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The Danish presidency which took over on 1 January, will attempt to make further progress with the embattled transparency dossier.

The Jack of transparency has been out of the box in the EU ever since the Commission presented a proposal to revise the current law on access to documents, in 2008.

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