{"id":29101,"date":"2017-06-20T08:55:35","date_gmt":"2017-06-20T06:55:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/?p=29101"},"modified":"2018-11-13T10:03:19","modified_gmt":"2018-11-13T09:03:19","slug":"requesters-appeal-to-eu-ombudsman-for-access-to-commissioners-expenses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/2017-06-20\/requesters-appeal-to-eu-ombudsman-for-access-to-commissioners-expenses\/","title":{"rendered":"Requesters appeal to EU Ombudsman for access to Commissioners\u2019 expenses"},"content":{"rendered":"

Madrid, 20 June 2017<\/em> – Access Info Europe and 53 requesters from across Europe appealed to the European Ombudsman about the European Commissions\u2019 failure to register, process, and respond to requests for the 2016 travel expenses of EU Commissioners submitted five months ago, in January 2017<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The joint complaint highlights the Commission\u2019s four major violations of the EU transparency rules:
\n(1) the failure to even register 152 of the requests;
\n(2) the failure to process 188 of the requests;
\n(3) failing to respond to 51 appeals;
\n(4) for outright refusals to process requests for President Juncker, the Vice President Timmermans, and Commissioners Ca\u00f1ete, Stylianides, and Oettinger<\/em> without providing reasons according to the law.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe behaviour of the Commission\u2019s Secretariat General is unprecedented<\/em>,\u201d said Helen Darbishire, Executive Director of Access Info, \u201cIt is violating a fundamental right in the EU treaties with its blatant refusal to process and respond<\/a> to these requests<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The campaign for access to Commissioners\u2019 expenses<\/a> has also raised serious questions about the record keeping of the EU institutions, after Access Info was told that the information was not stored in digital format meaning that preparation of documents would have to be done manually, taking 75.5 working days to find the documents, review them and redact any personal information that they might contain.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is shocking to the point of being barely credible that the travel costs of the EU\u2019s top politicians is not stored in a digital format<\/em>,\u201d added Darbishire, \u201cIt is clear that significant improvements the European Commission\u2019s record keeping are needed<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The appeal asks the Ombudsman to recommend that the Commission not only answer the requests and provide the requested travel expenses data, but also improve its poor record keeping practices so that basic information such as how much money is spent on official trips is easily available, or could even be published proactively.<\/p>\n

You can find a copy of the complaint here: \"file_doc\"<\/a><\/p>\n

For more information, please contact:<\/h2>\n

Helen Darbishire<\/strong>, Executive Director | Access Info Europe
\nor
\nAndreas Pavlou<\/strong>, RTI Campaigner and Researcher | Access Info Europe<\/p>\n

Send an e-mail<\/a> or call +34\u202f913\u202f656\u202f558<\/p>\n

Notes:<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Commission has recently written to Access Info to inform that it wants more time to deal with requests made under the campaign, but has not promised this will mean access to any information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Madrid, 20 June 2017 – Access Info Europe and 53 requesters from across Europe appealed to the European Ombudsman about the European Commissions\u2019 failure to register, process, and respond to requests for the 2016 travel expenses of EU Commissioners submitted five months ago, in January 2017. The joint complaint highlights the Commission\u2019s four major violations of the EU transparency rules: (1) the failure to even register 152 of the requests; (2) the failure to process 188 of the requests; (3) failing to respond to 51 appeals; (4) for outright refusals to process requests for President Juncker, the Vice President Timmermans,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":27874,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125,51],"tags":[897,641,72,901,548,193,759,966,918,898],"class_list":["post-29101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-eut","category-article","tag-commissioners-expenses","tag-complaint","tag-eu-commission","tag-eu-commissioners","tag-eu-ombudsman","tag-european-commission","tag-european-ombudsman","tag-ombudsman-compaint","tag-spending-transparency","tag-travel-expenses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29101"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29735,"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29101\/revisions\/29735"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.access-info.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}