Parliament report calls for common EU lobbyists register

  • The Commission's upcoming lobbyists register should be mandatory and common to all three institutions, recommends a report adopted on Tuesday (1 April) in the European Parliament's Constitutional Affairs Committee. But some NGOs and transparency groups believe the proposals are inadequate.


  • 3 avril 2008

    The report, drafted by Finnish MEP Alexander Stubb (EPP-ED) – who is now set to become his country's foreign minister - was adopted by a majority of 18 votes, with one vote against and three abstentions.

    The report calls for a mandatory public register for lobbyists to be established, common to the Council, Commission and Parliament and providing for "full financial disclosure". The register should also include a "common code of ethical behaviour," it says. Lobbyists must abide by this common code of conduct or "face sanctions," MEPs insisted, including possible expulsion from the register via "a common mechanism".

    Commenting after the vote, Stubb said the call for "a common register and common code of conduct between Parliament, Commission and Council" represented "a major step forward". Under the 'one-stop-shop' proposal, lobbyists would only need to register once to access all three institutions, he explained.

    The report stresses that all actors with a regular influence on the institutions are lobbyists and should be treated "in the same way" - whether representative of public or private interests. Its definition of lobbyists includes "professional lobbyists" and "companies' in-house lobbyists" as well as "NGOs, think tanks, trade associations, trade unions and employers' organisations". It also cites "lawyers when their purpose is to influence policy rather than case law".

    Stubb's report calls for the financial disclosure requirement to reveal lobbying expenditure "within meaningful parameters" rather than exact figures. It should be applied equally to all registered lobbyists, it says.

    This would mean that professional consultancies and law firms would have to disclose "the relative weight of their major clients and the costs associated with lobbying," while NGOS and think tanks would be required to "state their overall budgets and main sources of funding," said MEPs.

    Ahead of the vote there were calls for MEPs to ensure the report went far enough. Fintan Farrell, chair of the EU Civil Society Contact Group (an alliance of NGOs), warned that "not including the names of lobbyists and meaningful financial information would […] fail to provide confidence in the EU institutions.

    Commission spokesperson Valérie Rampi had earlier told EurActiv that "the names of individuals are not as important as the name of the organisation they are working for" and warned that a form of "financial disclosure that placed too much of an administrative burden on lobbyists would not be accepted" (see EurActiv 14/02/08).

    Meanwhile, lobbying transparency group ALTER-EUexternal said that "full financial disclosure needs clear criteria" and lamented that "no bandwidths for the disclosure of financial details have been set". Paul de Clerck of Friends of the Earth Europe called on MEPs to ensure that "meaningful ranges and thresholds" are developed.

    Stubb's report proposes creating a joint working group between the three institutions to prepare a proposal on a common register "by the end of 2008," which should define the financial disclosure criteria in more detail. It suggests "mutual recognition between Parliament, the Commission and the Council" of separate registers as a compromise in the event that agreement over a common register cannot be reached.

    The report is yet to be adopted by the full plenary of the European Parliament, with the vote set to take place during the Strasbourg session in May.