Verbatim report of proceedings

Thursday, 13 July 2023 - Strasbourg

Public access to documents – annual report for the years 2019-2021 (debate)

  Miapetra Kumpula-Natri, rapporteur for the opinion of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs. – Mr President, dear Commissioner, dear rapporteur and friends, the standards of visibility, transparency and accessibility in the European Union should be the best in the world. Accessible, transparent, reliable information about the decision-making of the European Union is the cornerstone to build the trust between citizens and decision-makers.

In the AFCO opinion, we also highlighted that Parliament’s own relevant bodies and all EU bodies should ensure that the documents are easily accessible to the public. It gives certain examples of the disappointing cases in the Council, in Commission but also in Parliament and very-well based recommendations that how to make the webpage more easily readable to gather the information and then also for the citizens to understand what is happening here.

I want to underline that the data, once it is given to the journalist or people should be in the machine-readable format. We live in the digitalised age and it’s quite horrible to listen that they only release the documents in the PDF format, and it’s especially important when it’s concerning numerical or financial data. So let us do this better and get digitalised and transparent institutions.