Released documents contain nothing controversial
If you want to make an information request to the EU's directorate-general for employment, its asks you to indicate which of the 27 member states you are from. Strangely it also offers you one other option - you can say you come from Wales.
Why the employment DG has made this unique concession to Welsh nationalism is not immediately obvious. But this is one of the intriguing minor mysteries about the operation of the European Commission's access to information processes which is revealed in .
Access Info asked the commission's main policy DGs for their internal guidance on how to handle requests made under the .
They were prompted to do this by the . This internal handbook advised officials to write two separate reports of meetings, a factual one which could be easily disclosed and an assessment or evaluation which could be held back without the need to redact passages from just one document.
It also warned against "recording statements which may turn out to be politically embarrassing for those who have made them". And the guide added: "Avoid making personal comments in e-mails with third parties which may be the object of disclosure... (eg don't refer to the great lunch you have had with an industry representative privately or add a PS asking if he/she would like to meet for a drink)."
The commission these instructions on the grounds that they "make it easier to get reports out" and "avoid having to go through blanking out" documents, although the handbook has since been rewritten.
The new Access Info survey reports on what it calls "serious problems" in how its requests were treated, outlining numerous obstacles to access and discrepancies in the procedures of other DGs.
Although most complied, the competition DG refused to supply its guidance since it had been "prepared for purely internal purposes". (Contrary to first impressions the photograph does not show the Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes looking in a bucket for her department's policy on this - in fact, this is her announcing a crackdown on price-fixing in the plastics industry at a press conference earlier this month).
And the campaign group criticises DGs who leave it unclear how members of the public should file requests, demand personal details from the requester, and make the process difficult for people who don't know English.
But as for the actual guidance obtained by the research, "the main finding was that after the shock of reading the DG trade vademecum, none of the documents released held anything particularly controversial. They were in the main part professionally written documents designed with the obvious intention of helping officials handle access to documents requests".
I've always wanted to find a way to write the headline above - now I just have.
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