Thanks to MEP Martin Ehrenhauser (independent), we now have access to a list of Commission & Council units that will be placed under the External Action Service of the EU as soon as it is functional.
Note: In the online registry of the Council, this document is not public. Why?
Scholz-Dämmerung – ein Nachruf
8 hours ago
2 comments:
I don't understand the Councyl policy on transparency... it is an issue you have raised some times. When they will wake up?
It is a threefold problem:
a) The Council as intergovernmental body is rather a diplomatic institution - and diplomacy has never been transparent.
b) The culture in the member states is quite different. You have stronger notions of transparency in the Nordic countries and a culture of secrecy in countries like Germany. Finding majorities against intransparency.
c) Part of the power of the Council lies in its intransparency. If you work on certain issues for a long time you can create interlocked and well-established compromises that are hard to disentangle when they become public. Criticism then can easily be refuted with the argument that these were difficult compromises that shouldn't be re-negotiated. If the Council was public, it had to deal with public criticism from the first day, weakening its standing with regard to the European Parliament.
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