BRUSSELS (AP) – A high -level European court judged on Wednesday that the European Commission had not provided a credible explanation to refuse access to the New York Times to text messages sent between its president Ursula von der Leyen and a pharmaceutical boss during the Pandemic COVID -19.
The case highlights the questions on the transparency of the Commission, which insists that text messages and other “ephemeral” electronic communications do not necessarily constitute documents of interest which should be saved or made public.
“Today’s decision is a transparency and responsibility victory in the European Union, and it sends a powerful message that ephemeral communications are not out of the range of the public exam,” said Nicole Taylor, spokesperson for the New York Times, after the court canceled the committee’s decision.
According to a statement from the EU General Court in Luxembourg, the lawyers of the American newspaper “managed to refute the presumption of non-existence and non-possession of the requested documents”.
The press release indicates that “the Commission can only simply declare that it does not hold the requested documents but must provide credible explanations allowing the public and the court to understand why these documents cannot be found.”
He said the Commission did not explain “plausibly” why messages did not contain important information.
He also said that the Commission “had not specified enough if the text messages requested had been deleted and, in the affirmative, whether the deletion was made deliberately or automatically or if the president’s mobile phone had been replaced in the meantime”.
The Commission said it would study the decision and decide “the following stages”, which could refer to an appeal before the European Court of Justice (CJCE), the EU court.
It is not clear if the text messages in question still exist and, in the affirmative, which has access to it. Von der Leyen was responsible for deciding whether the texts constituted value documents.
Transparency defenders argue that the EU’s increasingly powerful executive branch should maintain a paper trace of all its transactions and release documents on demand.
“This should serve as a catalyst for the Commission to finally modify its restrictive attitude towards freedom of information,” said Shari Hinds, responsible for transparency international policies, an anti-corruption group.
Païvi Leino-Sandberg, professor of law at the University of Helsinki, who has a legal challenge in progress before the same court concerning the rules of internal documentation of the Commission, described the news “a huge victory for transparency”.
“The Commission has lost so completely (in this decision) and on all the possible reasons that overthrow this in the CJCE seems extremely improbable,” she said.
The New York Times said that text messages had been exchanged between Von Der Leyen and the CEO of Pfizer Albert Bourla as communities ravaged by COVID-19 from Portugal to Finland and the EU rushed to buy billions of vaccines.
Von der Leyen was under a meticulous examination, especially after Astrazeneca tripped to issue doses of vaccine in the block of 27 nations.
In the midst of fierce international competition for access to vaccinesVon der Leyen was congratulated for his leading role during the pandemic. But it also faced strong criticisms for the opacity of negotiations to quickly collect 2.7 billion euros ($ 2.95 billion) to make an order for more than a billion doses.
At the same time that she would have exchanged messages directly with the boss of Pfizer, von der Leyen was publicly rent The company like ” A reliable partner. “”
Von Der Leyen was appointed to lead the Commission for a second five -year term last July. Critics say that the former German Minister of Defense of 66 does not like to question her decisions and that she centralized power at the headquarters of the Commission, where she lives in Brussels.
During his first mandate, Von der Leyen not only led the EU’s pandemic response, but also helped to quickly weaned the block of his dependence on Russian energy, after President Vladimir Putin used natural gas as lever to undermine European support for Ukraine.
“It is simply false that the chairman of the commission does not use text messages to carry out political affairs,” said Daniel Freund, the anti-corruption EU legislator and a member of the German Green Party. “This decision is a clear defeat for Ursula von der Leyen and a clear rejection of her practice to hide or hide her text messages.”
The populist government of Hungary, which authorized a Russian vaccine disputed at the start of the pandemic and was separated separately by the Commission by the Democratic decline, used the decision to target von der Leyen.
In an article on social networks, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, farting Szijjártó, allegedly alleged that she “gives us conferences on transparency while hiding her shaded transactions”. He called the text messages to make public and said: “Why were the vaccines delayed? Why did Europe paid too much?
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The writer Associated Press Lorne Cook in Brussels contributed to this report.
