Good morning,
EU states have their embassies in Brussels, where national officials grind away on often complex bills at the EU Council. Also known as permanent representations, the faceless co-legislators are not always the most transparent when it comes to figuring out who is who.
Even the most elementary task of getting the name of someone specialised in a particular policy area can be a daunting exercise. A new report by Civil Society Europe, a Brussels-based consortium of European networks of civil society organisations, has attempted to shed some light.
They looked for organigrammes, staff names and portfolios, as well as contact details, and meetings with lobbyists.
All this information could be found at permanent representations from Croatia, Finland, Italy, Portugal, Romania and Sweden. The six are seen as the most transparent, while Bulgaria and Ireland are the least.
Somewhere in the middle are the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain. Others like Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg only publish contact details of their staff but over zero input on lobbying.
Civil Society Europe had carried out a similar study in 2023. The Czech Republic, Denmark and Spain have since fallen in transparency standards.
The backsliding and disparate mix of standards among the representations is part of a wider transparency problem when it comes to legislative making at the EU level.
There have been some improvements over the years, but the obfuscation and complexity are a democratic accountability loss, especially for the electorate. Instead, those in the know tend to be the lobbyists, whose interests are not always aligned with the public good.
- Nikolaj Nielsen, home affairs editor
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