The European Parliament should take several steps to improve its own transparency, according to a Finnish parliamentarian who also lambasted the Danish presidency and the EU Commission for recently failing to compromise during negotiations on the EU access regulations.
Finnish liberal Anneli Jäätteenmäki made her comments in a column published in Wobbing EU. She also is a member of the Constitutional Affairs Committee and Co-Rapporteur on the Revision of the Regulation 1049/2001 on the Access to the EU Documents. (See recent FreedomInfo.org reports on the EU access negotiations.)
Looking at events of recent weeks, she wrote that the Danish Presidency “lacked a real political will to push the revision forward” and that the Commission “kept its negative attitude in the negotiations.”
Parliament “was working hard in order to find an agreement, she states. “It was ready to compromise but not to take steps backwards in the name of transparency.”
Jäätteenmäki makes three suggestions for Parliament to improve its own transparency, beginning with making all the votes in the committees and in the plenary public. She also suggests making public the minutes of the coordinators’ meetings in the committees, commenting, “The important decisions of the committees are now made in secrecy.”
Third, she says, “Let’s create a new public database for the four-column documents from the trialogue meetings. Once the Rapporteur receives them, the documents shall be put in the database immediately. The citizens have the right to know the positions of the EU Institutions in the negotiations of the EU legislation.”
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