ACCESS TO DOCUMENTS: CFI SAYS COMMISSION CANNOT MAKE BLANKET REFUSAL ON FILE ACCESS.

The Court said the EU institutions should, in principle, carry out a concrete individual assessment of the documents under request. It can be excused only if it is clear that access should be denied or granted. In exceptional cases and only where an assessment would prove to be "a particularly heavy" administrative burden, the institutions can plead a waiver. In all other cases, the assessment should help it decide if it could make allow partial access

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Access to documents is already proving an administrative headache for the Commission. Requests have doubled since Regulation 1049/2001 entered into force in December 2001 (see 2844). This ruling will force the services to justify why they are refusing to release each and every document in a file. But ultimately it is unlikely to have the effect transparency advocates would want. Competition cases are particularly sensitive because the Commission's files often contain confidential business information that firms do not want made public. Whether sales data or classified recipes, business secrets which could give rivals an advantage are handed over to the Commission on the understanding that they are not passed on.

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VKI is taking several cases against a number of Austrian banks in the Austrian courts, as national law allows it to champion consumers' financial rights. One of the banks it is suing is the Bank fur Arbeit und Wirtschaft AG (BAWAG). The VKI claims that BAWAG charged its customers too much interest over several years because it made mistakes...