EU: Council to renege on inter-institutional openness deal?
01 August 2001
One of the "deals" done during the secret "trialogue" meeting which reached the later adopted "compromise" on the new Regulation on access to EU documents was an interinstitutional agreement between the Council (the 15 EU governments) and the European Parliament on access to classified information. The European Parliament negotiators in particular invested much in this idea.
Discussions were held between the parliament and the Council over a number of months and agreement appeared to have been reached in April this year. But in May, after the adoption of the "compromise" new Regulation on access the Council agreed a new draft at COREPER (the committee of high-level representatives of EU governments) on 11 May. This draft sought to only cover security and defence policies and to exclude police and judicial cooperation and even visa, asylum and immigration policies (by invoking Article 67 of the Treaty establishing the European Communities which only allows for parliament to be consulted for first five years of the Amsterdam Treaty).
To add insult to injury the Council said that it intends to adopt a "unilateral declaration", when the agreement is formally adopted, applying the Council's own security regulations prior to passing any documents to the parliament. This could render any agreement quite meaningless.
The Socialist (PSE) and conservative (PPE) groups in the parliament favour going along with the Council's proposal but the Green/EFA and the ELDR (Liberal) groups are very unhappy about the exclusion of "third pillar" issues (policing, legal cooperation and asylum and immigration) and with the "unilateral declaration".
The issue still lay on the table when the institutions broke up for their summer vacation period (August) and when they came back the events of 11 September put the issue on the back-burner.
European Parliament takes Council to court over "Solana Two"
The European Parliament is taking the Council of the European Union to the Court of Justice over its failure to consult the parliament over the adoption of a new classification code for access to documents it adopted in March 2001. The parliament argues that this was quite inappropriate as the institutions (the parliament, Council and the European Commission) were in the process of discussing a new Regulation on public access to documents.
The Secretary?General of the Council, Mr Solana, drew up the new classification code which was simply nodded through by the General Affairs Council of the Council of the European Union on 19 March (it was an "A" point, adopted without debate) ? the European Parliament was not consulted. This followed the now infamous "Solana Decision" in July last year.
The Decision completely changed the Council's classification codes to meet NATO demands. Although it was presented as only covering "Top Secret", "Secret" and "Confidential" documents it also covers the lowest level of classified documents, "Restricted", and completely redefines this too. It also extends classifications to all areas of EU activity.
As noted in the Explanatory Memorandum of 18 January 2001 from the UK Foreign Office:
the Regulation will also mean that sensitive documents in other fields ? justice and home affairs, for example, are kept sufficiently secure.
This is a clear extension of classification rules and security procedures from the "Solana Decision" adopted in August 2000 which only covered defence and foreign policy (ESDP) issues.
There is a major change to the definition of "Restricted", the lowest level of classification, which in the previous code was defined as:
RESTREINT: information the unauthorised disclosure of which would be inappropriate or premature
In the Annex, page 19, to the proposed Decision this is redefined as:
EU RESTRICTED: This classification shall be applied to information and material the unauthorised disclosure of which could be disadvantageous to the interests of the European Union or one or more<