If you are asking for information from the Commission on infringement procedures, or on the so-called Pilot procedures (negotiations between the Commission and the MS in order to avoid infringements), the answer is refusal.
If you do the same at your national Government, maybe you get information, but it only depends of the flexibility and discretion of the Member State, whereas even they could refuse the information request any moment.
We brought together the EC, a few MS representatives and NGOs in the morning of 30th June at the Aarhus Convention MOP5 to pose the question: Why is it so? A presentation of the legal basis of the issue was followed by interverntions from the Commission and an ACCC member, and eventually by comments from NGOs. The discussion resulted in a quite lively and interesting debate in which one side insisted on existing EU Court case law, while the other called upon the principle of transparency and the unnecessity of hiding information from the public for practical reasons, i.e. public scrutiny in many cases can promote MS compliance.
J&E will not stop here; we are dealing with this issue in 2014 again, and we make sure our actions contribute to more freedom of information.
