Emily O'Reilly has opened an investigation into the transparency of "trilogues" with a view to boosting transparent law-making in the EU.
The EU Ombudsman, Ms. Emily O’Reilly has asked the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union for detailed information about their disclosure policies on trilogue documents including details of meetings, minutes and notes and lists of participants. She will be inspecting the same two files in all 3 institutions which are the Mortgage Credit Directive and the Clinical Trials Regulations because they deal with matters of wide public interest. In her view, the trialogues may be too secretive to comply with transparency requirements and may ask for a full public list of on-going trialogues and a record of their documents She is expecting a reply by 30 September 2015
Furthermore, after asking for a review of the expert groups in the Commission, Ms O’Reilly has expressed her satisfaction with the initial response from the Commission to increase the transparency of the processes in expert groups. The Commission has said it will develop a new conflict of interest policy for experts appointed in a personal capacity. It also announced that the selection procedure for experts will be more transparent, including an obligation, where relevant, to be registered on the Transparency Register. Furthermore, the Commission plans to revise its expert groups register in 2016. The Ombudsman will now study the Commission's reply in detail and publish her full analysis soon.
It should be noted that all of this is taking place against the backdrop of ongoing trialogues on the General Data Protection Regulation.
