To:
The President of the European Council
The President of the Council of the European Union
The President of the European Commission
The President of the Eurogroup
The Hague, December 20th, 2017
Dear President Tusk, Prime Minister Ratas, President Juncker and President Dijsselbloem,
During a plenary meeting of the Conference of Parliamentary Committees for Union Affairs of
Parliaments of the European Union (COSAC) held in Tallinn on 26-28 November 2017, delega-
tions of the national parliaments of the European Union and the European Parliament discussed
how the EU can be brought closer to its citizens. National parliaments can play a large role in
this. However, one of the conclusions of this discussion was that more transparency of political
decision-making is needed within the EU. More openness facilitates better public and parlia-
mentary debates before votes take place, and afterwards ensures that citizens know how their
governments voted. Transparency could thus create more accountability for the outcomes of
political decision-making, as well as making decision-making process itself more legitimate by
opening it up for input from citizens, stakeholders, media and national parliaments.
In order to attain a higher level of transparency and thereby political legitimacy of the EU, we,
the undersigned delegations to the COSAC, propose four actions which we believe your institu-
tions must take. We invite you to discuss these proposals amongst yourselves and inform us on
how you will implement them in due course. The four actions are:
1. Legislative documents must systematically be made public without delay
We call upon the Council to start applying the Transparency Regulation (Regulation 1049/2001)
as intended and in line with the Court's case law. This means that within the Council, routine
procedures and working methods must be established to carefully assess whether a new docu-
ment should be made available to the public immediately, or whether one of the exceptions in
Article 4 of the Transparency Regulation applies. This assessment must be made on a docu-
ment-by-document basis and directly upon circulation among Member State governments. The
Council should also broaden the definition of "legislative document" in order to include presi-
dency conclusions, state-of-play documents and multi-column texts.
2. The Council must adopt more specific and detailed rules regarding reporting
on legislative deliberations
We call upon the Council to standardize the reporting on Council meetings and preparatory
Council meetings involving the creation of legislation and to establish these standards in its
rules of procedure. This means that a comprehensive agenda must be distributed for each
meeting in which legislation is discussed. Furthermore, the minutes of the meetings must pro-
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