The European Commission’s chronic failure to live up to its own transparency and accountability standards—something we’ve been sounding the alarm on for years—has now become so bad that even the most pro-EU mainstream media outlets felt compelled to speak out.
In an open letter addressed to Trade and Transparency Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič, some 140 journalists from media across Europe and beyond called out the EU Commission for shirking its duty to remain accountable to the public—as clearly laid out in the EU treaties—and demanded an end to its repeated refusals to operate transparently.
The signatories—who include reporters from Follow The Money, Politico, Euractiv, Euronews, countless national outlets, and even the presidents of the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) and the International Press Association (IPA)—pointed out that the EU treaties describe access to documents as a fundamental right and “a key tool for the press in scrutinizing the European Union institutions in their legislative, supervisory, and administrative functions.”
They reminded Šefčovič that he acknowledged that the EU is obliged to conduct its legislative work “as openly as possible” during his confirmation hearing last fall. Yet the Commission’s systemic shortcomings, as observed by the European Ombudsman in recent years, continue to “undermine the fundamental principles of transparency and accountability enshrined in EU law.”
In particular, the letter highlights two persistent issues regarding freedom of information requests for EU Commission documents.
One is the regular delays in processing these requests. The EU Commission has exceeded the statutory deadline of 15 working days in over 60% of cases, and often by 60 days or even by a whole year in some cases, as we also reported before. “We believe that ‘justice delayed is justice denied,’ and these delays significantly hinder journalists from fulfilling their public watchdog role,” the letter says.
The other major problem is the overly broad application of exceptions to the right of information access—a practice that the EU ombudsman has also repeatedly criticized. In particular, the Commission often fails to provide concrete evidence of the alleged harm that disclosure of certain documents would cause, and it relies on this excuse far too often.
Egregious examples of the Commission’s refusal to disclose documents are too many to count, but it’s enough to think about Pfizergate or the illegal lobby scandals around the Green Deal and Chat Control. Most recently, the EU Commission rejected all 86 freedom of information requests for NGO financing documents submitted by the Patriots for Europe (PfE) group, which prompted the conservative lawmakers to call for the establishment of a separate inquiry committee to investigate corruption and transparency issues in the EU institutions.
“We urge the Commission to address these issues with urgency and stand ready to contribute constructively to developing solutions,” the journalists’ open letter concludes.
