Sunday, 18 April 2010

EU Council & transparency: A long way to go

Facts & figures
  • On 31 December 2009, the EU Council had 1,371,608 documents of which 24.2% were not publicly accessible (>300,000). 22,686 documents were only partially accessible.
  • In 2009, 425 documents were produced as "Confidential" and 20 as "Secret". Only 156 of the former and 1 of the latter are actually mentioned in the online register. There is no mentioning of the number of documents classified "Top Secret".
  • Requests for access were made to 8,443 documents that were not public. 6,452 (76.4%) of them were actually released, fully or partially. Most of the applicants (28.2%) came from Belgium. 5.6% of the refusals were for reasons of public security, 3.5% concerned military matters.
  • Only three complaints regarding refusal to receive access to documents were made to the European Ombudsman, one of them regarding ACTA.
Source: Eigth annual report of the Council on the implementation of Regulation No 1049/2001 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 May 2001 regarding public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents (draft)
Picture: © zkorb / CC BY-NC 2.0

2 comments:

Niels said...

Notice how few applicants there are from eastern Europe...

Julien Frisch said...

This picture is similar to the interest group population in Brussels: CEE countries are lagging behind and are rather represented through the European and international organisations (which may let them appear under the "Belgium" category).