Keywords

Summary



Keywords

1 Commission - Public right of access to Commission documents - Decision 94/90 - Exceptions to the principle of access to documents - Protection of the public interest - Court proceedings - Scope - Cooperation between the Commission and national courts on the basis of Notice 93/C 39/05 on the application of the competition rules

(Commission Decision 94/90; Commission Notice 93/C 39/05)

2 Acts of the institutions - Statement of reasons - Obligation - Scope - Decision confirming an initial decision

(EC Treaty, Art. 190)

Summary

3 Decision 94/90 on public access to Commission documents provides, as an exception to the general principle of the right of access to documents, that the institutions are to refuse access to any document where disclosure could undermine, inter alia, `the protection of the public interest (... court proceedings ...)'. That exception is intended to ensure general respect for the fundamental right of every person to a fair hearing by an independent tribunal which means that both national and Community courts must be free to apply their own rules of procedure concerning the powers of the judge, the conduct of the proceedings in general and the confidentiality of the documents on the file in particular. The scope of that exception is therefore not restricted solely to the protection of the interests of the parties in the context of specific court proceedings, but encompasses the procedural autonomy of the aforementioned courts, so that it entitles the Commission to rely on that exception even when it is not itself party to the court proceedings which justify the protection of the public interest.

Application of that exception can be justified only in respect of documents drafted by the Commission for the sole purposes of a particular court case, to the exclusion of other documents which exist independently of such proceedings, since the decision whether or not to grant access to the first category of documents is a matter for the appropriate national court alone, in accordance with the essential rationale of the aforementioned exception.

As regards documents sent by the Commission to a national court in response to a request for information from the latter in the context of cooperation based on Notice 93/C 39/05 on the application of Articles 85 and 86 of the Treaty, the protection of the public interest requires the Commission to refuse access to that information, and therefore to the documents containing it, because the decision concerning access to such information is a matter to be decided exclusively by the appropriate national court on the basis of its own national procedural law for as long as the court proceedings giving rise to its incorporation in a Commission document are pending.

4 The duty to give reasons for a decision laid down in Article 190 of the Treaty has a two-fold purpose, namely, on the one hand, to permit interested parties to know the justification for the measure so as to enable them to protect their rights and, on the other, to enable the Community judicature to exercise its power to review the legality of the decision. The question as to whether a statement of reasons satisfies those requirements must be assessed with reference not only to its wording but also to its context and the whole body of legal rules governing the matter in question.

When the institution rejects an application for access to documents, and states the reasons, and the party concerned submits a confirmatory application seeking to have that rejection reconsidered, and the institution's reply confirms the rejection on the same grounds, it is appropriate to consider the sufficiency of the reasons given in the light of all the exchanges between the institution and the applicant, taking into account also the information already available to the applicant.