Debate: Transparency and administrative standards - the treatment of public access requests based on Regulation  No /
Date: THURSDAY, 10 MARCH 2022
Speaker: Věra Jourová
Language: EN

I agree with Ms Incir, who said that without transparency there is no accountability. I myself used this sentence so many times when we were discussing and negotiating the transparency register. And, believe me, the Commission was the one that was pushing for as strong transparency as possible because, from what I heard, it was the other two institutions that were saying how we should be more careful, not be so open, that we have to be operational, not publish documents during trilogues, and so on. So I don’t agree with Sophia in ‘t Veld when she says that the Commission is not trustworthy enough. I have been working in this institution for many years now, and I can see that there is a high level of support for the maximum possible transparency. So we will work with the Parliament and the Council to do better, because I agree with those of you who said that there is a lot of room for improvement. I will come to this because this is the debate about one case, and also systemic matters relating to the way in which we communicate and enable access to documents. On the ad-hoc case, the text messages, I have to say that in times of crisis, indeed, when you are an executive body and you have the burden of responsibility on your shoulders, you have to be operational; you sometimes have to engage in personal communication; you have to be fast. As for the burden of responsibility, well, we can discuss it, whether we should have done what we did: we invested in vaccine research; we invested a lot in having common procurement and, as you said, the EU has very little competence in the field of health care. In spite of that, President von der Leyen took the risks and she engaged heavily, days and nights, in guaranteeing the early delivery of the vaccines to the European people, and I admire her for this work. I think that in this case, she is the role model, not the other way around. You may not see her as a role model of transparency but I see her as a role model for taking her responsibility seriously and acting quickly and in an efficient way. As for what Mr Annemans said, that the Commission acted in an ephemeral way, well if that had been the case we would not have had the people vaccinated in Europe. So I’m sorry but I have to look at this case also in context and the real nature of the situation, and this was at the peak of the COVID-19 crisis. But this case is not closed, and I said before that we are preparing an answer to the Ombudsman with a deadline of 26 April, and we will give all of the information necessary to reply to the Ombudsman’s requests. On the systemic side, so let’s make an agreement to increase the system, or improve the system, of access to documents in all three institutions – in the Commission, Parliament and Council. You know well that we have the legislation from 2001 and you said it here many times that the rules need to be modernised. I agree 100%. When we started in COVID times with purely online communication, not face to face, and with a lot of telephone diplomacy, I felt myself that this was a new way of communicating and was something which should be reflected also in how transparent we are. So I agree that we need to reflect in new rules that there are modern channels and modern ways of communication, and that should be our new interpretation of the exemptions which Mr Pospíšil called for. There should be a new, precise definition of what constitutes a document. I agree with all that. So, my question to you is whether you will unblock the situation around the directives, which were prepared to update the rules from 2001, and whether we will be able to withdraw the legislation which is pending and prepare new rules. We are working on them. And if this will not be possible for all the institutions, we are determined to come with new internal rules for the Commission. And as I said many times before, I don’t want to wait because I am really convinced that we have to modernise the rules and reflect also the new technological reality. So this is my call for cooperation with the Parliament to push things forward where they should be pushed, in the interest of higher transparency and better access to documents. So I wanted to be concrete in my answer, also to confirm that I am aware that we should do better, and I am ready to cooperate.