Browsing by Subject "Access to documents"

The principle of transparency is a core principle within EU administration being highly intertwined with the right to access to documents. Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 May 2001 regarding public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents (ATD Regulation) lays down the principles and limits on public access to documents. The European Ombudsman has set itself the particular task of promoting transparency and the right to access to documents. The research focusses on the processing of public access to documents requests by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) and the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA). While EMA and Frontex apply so-called queuing mechanisms, ECHA processes access to documents requests in batches when multiple requests or one large request by one applicant are submitted in a short period of time as these multiple submissions could possibly result in adversely affecting the proper functioning of the agencies. The agencies base these means of processing on Article 6(3) ATD enabling the EU institution to confer with the applicant with a view to finding a fair solution. The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that EU institutions can, based on the principle of proportionality, balance the interests of the applicant to gain access to documents against the workload of the EU institutions caused by the submission of multiple access to documents requests. The Court further stated that Article 6(3) mirrors the possibility of reconciling the interests of the applicant with those of good administration. The European Ombudsman found that applying a queuing mechanism can be considered a suitable means to process multiple requests by one applicant under exceptional circumstances, but academic literature has not dealt with this topic yet. The thesis hence addresses more profoundly the question of the extent to which the queuing mechanisms and the processing in batches as applied by the EU agencies in question are able to reconcile the principle of transparency with the right to good administration and fairness amongst applicants while maintaining the core business and efficiency of the applicable EU agency. Furthermore, the thesis examines if a better alternative to these mechanisms can be found. The study comes to the conclusion that, on the one hand, the queuing mechanisms and the processing in batches have deficits in regard to enhancing transparency and complying with the ATD Regulation. On the other hand, they are able to balance out the different interests between the EU agency and the applicant to some extent. Instead of however finding a better alternative to these mechanisms, a potential solution is, as the study has revealed, to find a better administrative process to reduce the number of ATD requests in order to deprive the queuing mechanisms and the processing in batches of their necessity to better adhere to the principle of transparency and the principle of efficiency. A better administrative process could for instance be the combination of a web form to submit an access to documents request with the obligatory search in a public register of documents to potentially reduce the overall number of requests submitted to the EU institutions every day. Ultimately, it is in the hands of the EU institutions to make EU administration more transparent and to reconcile the different interests at stake.