ALTER-EU demands
ALTER-EU has been campaigning for the following demands to be set as the minimum requirements for lobby transparency and ethics regulation:
EU lobbying disclosure legislation, which must include:
- A mandatory system of electronic registration and reporting for all lobbyists with a significant annual lobbying budget, so that legislators and citizens know who is attempting to shape EU policies. Information should be made available to the public in the form of a user-friendly online database, fully searchable and downloadable to enable detailed research and analysis of its members. Information should include a list of all clients and the legislative dossiers lobbied on, the EU institutions targeted, and the total financial amount received per client;
- Enforceable ethics rules for lobbyists (for instance prohibiting employment of officials or their relatives for lobbying purposes).
An improved code of conduct for European Commission officials, including:
Existing frameworks, such as the Staff Regulations or the Code of Conduct for Commissioners, address some key issues with reference to the code of conduct for EU officials. ALTER-EU recommends expanding these rules as well as the creation of a new framework for lobbyists that should be overseen by a public body:
- Recording of formal and informal meetings between Commission officials and lobbyists and logging of correspondence (to be made available in a fully searchable online database);
- An extended ’cooling off’ period before Commissioners and senior officials can start working for lobby groups or lobbying advisory firms;
- The European Commission should encourage the other EU institutions, particularly the European Parliament and the European Council, to develop similar rules.
The termination of cases of privileged access and undue influence granted to corporate lobbyists, for instance:
- Joint taskforces in which corporate interests are represented while public interest NGOs are not (such as the Biofuels Research Advisory Council which consists of Commission officials, CEOs and lobbyists from the industry, but no environmental NGOs);
- The privileged status accorded to business lobby groups like the European Services Forum and the Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue.
ALTER-EU believes that these represent minimum requirements if the ’European Transparency Initiative’ is to achieve meaningful democratic progress. Our full demands are detailed in our founding statement.
