Transparency of decision making processes is a key element for democracy: access to documents, and clarity of the policy making flow and key players are essential for citizens, civil society organisations and journalists to act as watchdogs to ensure that policy making is not captured by vested interests. Transparency of the institutions is also mandated by the Treaties of the EU (art. 15 TFEU) and the right to access documents from the institutions is enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (art. 42). That is even more relevant for the European Parliament, the only EU institution directly elected by its citizens. 

That is why Civil Society Europe (CSE) performed an analysis of the transparency of Committees and subcommittees in the European Parliament active at the end of the 2019-2024 term. The analysis was conducted in February 2024 and updated until the 30th May 2024, and scrutinised the Committees’ websites. It looked at seven dimensions: 

1) availability of the amendment’s voting list before a committee vote; 

2) availability of the compromise amendments before a committee vote; 

3) availability of the list of the committee coordinators; 

4) availability of the minutes of the coordinators’ meetings, 

5) existence of a committee’s newsletter, 

6) availability of the Committee work in progress document (so-called “ITER listing”); 

7) publication of state-of-play interinstitutional negotiations/trilogues documents. 

On a general level, no Committee fulfilled all the seven dimensions considered by the analysis. In this regard, the ITRE Committee was found to be the most transparent (as it was the only one for which we could find the interinstitutional and trilogue documents, with the negotiating positions of the Parliament, Commission and Council), followed by EMPL, ENVI, IMCO and TRAN, and partially by FEMM. Our research identified SEDE as the least transparent Committee, followed closely by DROI, SANT, AFET, DEVE, and to a lesser extent by INTA and PETI. 

The Conference of Committee Chairs is in charge of defining minimum standards for all committees, and in the previous mandate committed to publishing voting lists and compromise amendments. With the new Parliament term, CSE believes that increasing the transparency of the Committees would be a positive signal to start the new Parliament term. In particular, CSE proposes the following recommendations:

1) To uniformise the practices of publication of the different documents, ensuring that the same type of document can be found in the same place on each of the Parliament Committees’ websites;

2) To ensure the respect of the mandatory publishing of the voting lists and compromise amendments together with the agendas of the Committee meetings, as half of the Committees already do;

3) To have a standalone document with the Committee Coordinators in the home page of each Committee’s website;

4) To have the Coordinators’ meetings’ minutes available as a standalone document in the “Publications” section of each Committee’s website;

5) For the Committees that have not done it yet, to start publishing Committee newsletters with regularity over time;

6) To make the ITER listing, or similar legislative progress reports, available on the home page of each Committee’s website;

7) To publish the 4-column documents of all the trilogue and interinstitutional negotiations where the Committee is involved with a specific “Trilogues and Reports” button in the homepage of their websites. 

You can read the full analysis here, while the detailed data for each Committee can be found here. 

Civil Society Europe (CSE) is the coordination of civil society organisations at EU level. Through its membership, CSE unites EU-level membership-based organisations that reach out to millions of people active in or supported by not-for-profits and civil society organisations across the EU. CSE was created by several civil society organisations as a follow-up to the European Year of Citizens and was established as an international not-for-profit under Belgian law in 2016. Since then, it has become the point of reference for EU institutions on transversal issues concerning civil dialogue and civic space.

For further information on this topic, please contact matteo(dot)vespa(at)civilsocietyeurope(dot)eu