Democracy International, ALTER-EU, Corporate Europe Observatory and other civil society organisations have persistently been reporting on the new rules that entered into force in November 2014 stipulating that lobby meetings involving European Commission officials must be reported. The new rules are aimed at improving the transparency of EU decision making. To this end, the Commission adopted a decision to publish all meetings of its Vice-Presidents, Commissioners, their cabinets and the Directors-General with lobbyists and interest representatives.
However, an analysis of the data by ALTER-EU with the help of Transparency International’s new online tool, IntegrityWatch.eu, shows that “lobbyists representing businesses and trade associations continue to dominate the lobbying scene in Brussels, making up 75% of all high-level meetings and more than 80% in certain areas such as financial regulation or the internal market”. Furthermore the findings suggest that already a few months into the new commission’s term, there seems to be an increasing occurrence of under-reporting of lobby meetings.
The civil society organisations call on the European Commission to take measures to ensure a more balanced representation of stakeholders in these meetings and ensure the ban on meeting unregistered lobbyists is enforced on all levels.
Eager to fight alongside these organisations is Sven Giegold, Green MEP and the rapporteur of the “Report on Transparency, Integrity and Accountability”. He has teamed up with Democracy International calling stakeholders to fill out a questionnaire as part of a new campaign called “One against 30,000” and rate proposals put forward by the aforementioned organisations in order to tackle excessive lobbying.
On August 25th suggestions will be handed over to Sven Giegold in a bid to be included in his report on the issue. On September 3rd, Giegold will present its conclusions at the conference “Transparent, clean, accountable: Lessons from international best practice for the EU institutions”, taking place at the European Parliament in Brussels. High-level experts and politicians will sit alongside citizens and civil society to discuss how the “seemingly hopeless struggle” can be won.
A draft version of the programme is available here, speakers' confirmations will follow-up soon.