By 3 June next, the Council, the Commission and Parliament are required to have fully implemented the European Government Information Act, in other words the Regulation that grants access to documents. For the European Parliament, this means that the list of Parliament documents which will be directly accessible via the register, will need to be appended to Parliament’s Rules of Procedure. This additional Annex requires approval by a regular majority of the Members. The debate on this will take place today and the vote will be held tomorrow. The list that is before us is for the most part the result of an accurate and legal application of the Regulation. A team presided over by Parliament’s Deputy Secretary General has drawn up the initial list. In the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, a small number of documents have been added whose public access is not compulsory, but desirable. I would mention the working documents, recommendations and statements of parliamentary delegations – which did not feature on the original list – the attendance lists of the plenary and committee meetings – which are, in fact, included in the Minutes and are, as such, already accessible to the public indirectly – and the list of staff of the MEPs. As rapporteur, I support these additions, which are also partly my own. As far as public access to the staff list is concerned, I take the view that this will, moreover, need to be in line with the Bureau’s decision of 11 June 2001, in other words Members and staff will need to take it upon themselves to add their names to the public list. I hope that the entire list can be approved in that way. Restrictions that do not comply with the Regulation, however, cannot be accepted, because otherwise the European Court of Justice will be instructing us to add to the list again and Parliament will have lost face. With this list, the European Parliament has met all the obligations concerning the Regulation’s implementation. Does that make everything shipshape? Unfortunately not yet. Neither the European Commission nor the Council have, in our opinion, met all the conditions for implementing the Regulation. Especially where documents of third parties are concerned, for example documents of Member States or of external organisations, things could be arranged more effectively. As far as foreign and defence policies are concerned, although the Regulation has precedence over the Solana decision that was taken at the time, no final solution has yet been found for confidential and secret documents. This too will need to be provided for. In general, public access to third-party documents still poses a major problem, because in this respect, particularly the Commission and the Council are more rigid than required. In fact, Member States that still have no proper legislation in the field of public access are urgently required to lay down legislation in this area themselves as soon as possible. Objections which are still being raised by some Member States will then become redundant. It is unacceptable for public access vis-à-vis citizens in one EU country to be far greater than in another, and it is wholly unacceptable for a lack of public access in some EU countries to undermine the implementation of this Regulation. I therefore call on the Commission to produce a directive which obliges all EU Member States to apply more transparency and allow public access. And I will certainly make this point at the Convention on the future of Europe, of which I am a member. Finally, it strikes me as important that we should not wait too long before this Regulation is evaluated. We have made huge progress with this Regulation, but quite a few aspects still need defending. The initial evaluation will take place at the end of this year, and I hope to be involved in this again. Those ultimately reaping the benefits of this Regulation, however, are our own citizens. They will, especially via the Internet as well, be able to call up much more information than before. This will benefit Parliament’s reputation and that of the European institutions, and it is also particularly valuable for the democracy in Europe in general.

Political group: PPE-DE