Mr President, in the debate on transparency it is worth stating right away that we are not starting from scratch, as rules on public access to information have been in force in the institutions of the European Union since around 1993. Therefore, the only true point of comparison is this: will we be improving the situation as it is now by means of these new rules? We also have to take into account the fact that the Ombudsman and the Court of Justice have, over the years, been improving the rules in force on public access to documents and making them much more specific. For this thanks go to all those active NGOs and individuals that have refused to believe that the institutions can deny them access to certain documents, and that have sought to appeal against such negative decisions. When to this we add the fact that the Treaty of Amsterdam guarantees the right – in its broadest possible sense – to have access to documents of the Union institutions, we could say that the existing basic framework is quite demanding. With regard to the matter in hand, it is my opinion that the acceptance of this compromise raises certain questions. The European Parliament should have insisted on using its powers to repair the defects of this compromise. I will most probably be accused of being a fanatical transparency activist, but I refuse to accept this and I refute the charge. I simply want to describe to you now how I think Parliament should have bided its time and continued the debate. First of all, it is worth mentioning that these talks during the Swedish Presidency have been going on in camera. The European Parliament should really be very careful about when it becomes involved in an accelerated codecision procedure such as this, as it tends to forsake the issue of transparency to a considerable degree. Parliament has often been able to bring pressure on the Council of Ministers to make improvements to their proposals in accordance with its own objectives through various stages of the codecision procedure. With regard to restrictions on time, it is a fact that the institutions – including Parliament – wasted quite a lot of time, which could have been successfully spent in the successive stages of the codecision procedure, where Parliament often makes considerable gains towards the end. In this regard I have found that the Swedish Presidency has perhaps created a sort of Stockholm syndrome, and that Parliament’s negotiators maybe took the claim that only Sweden could bring this matter to a creditable conclusion too literally. I myself have no reason to doubt that Belgium, for example, would rate as well as anyone else in the transparency stakes, and that it is learning all the time to respect the issue more and more. I therefore believe we would easily have been able to continue. I would like to illustrate certain problems with this Regulation by showing you a small object. This is a Russian wooden doll. This one possibly has a rather ugly face: perhaps it should have a more beautiful one as we are talking about transparency. Let us imagine that this doll is the Regulation on transparency in question. When we open up the doll we find new dolls inside. This is just how these rules work. Inside the regulation on transparency there is also a sort of shadow regulation that the Council has managed to smuggle in, saying that there is a whole pile of documents labelled as ‘sensitive’, which are covered by quite separate rules from those we have written into the paragraphs of the Article relating to transparency. When it is being said here that this Regulation on transparency repeals the so-called Solana Decision I can state that this is not the case at all, but in fact there are more new rules to be found in it, helping to ensure that the Solana Decision is incorporated in this Regulation in a new form. And, at the end, who do we find but Mr Solana himself! This is thus a question of these sensitive documents making it possible for the Council of Ministers in particular to conceal a large number of documents. I think it a pity that the European Parliament did not challenge the Council of Ministers a little more forcefully on this issue. For that we would have required rather more time, rather more transparency and some measure of public debate.

Political group: Verts-ALE