COUNCIL OF MINISTERS: BIG RISE IN REQUESTS FOR ACCESS TO DOCUMENTS.

Internal changes.

The statistics are contained in a draft report in which Council assesses the impact of the Regulation, which took effect on December 3, 2001. The European Parliament and European Commission - the other two institutions to which the Regulation applies - are due to publish similar reports. Over the past year, the Council's Secretariat General has sought to comply with the new rules by supplying Council officials with a practical guide to handling requests for access. It says that documents summarising internal discussions are increasingly being released to the public retroactively i.e. once the legal act it concerns is adopted. The 15-day deadline for responding to requests has largely been observed.

Register.

The Council's online register has been operational since 1999 and it now contains 375,154 documents, 168,647 of which are directly accessible to the public. In 2002, almost one million people logged onto the register and 4.6 million pages were consulted. Only 250 documents were classified as "top secret", "secret" or "confidential" and 77 of these were mentioned in the register. According to a Council Decision taken in August 2000 - know as the "Solana Decision" - such documents are not for public consumption and do not have to be listed on the register.

Requests.

Despite the doubling of requests for access in 2002, the number of actual documents requested only increased slightly, from 8,090 in 2001 to 9,317 in 2002. This is put down to the fact that more people directly download the documents they want from the Internet and only apply for those marked as "restrained" on the register. After students and researchers, the most common sources of requests are industry (14.5%), lobbyists (13%) and lawyers (10.5%). Only 2% of requests came from journalists while the origin of 22% is unknown. As for geographical origin, 27.5% came from Belgium, followed by Germany (13%) and the United Kingdom (9.5%), with non-EU countries accounting for 6.5% of the total. After justice and home affairs, the topics most in demand were internal market (14.5%), economic and monetary policy (10.5%), external relations (8.5%) and...