Text messages between European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and the CEO of giant pharmaceutical company Pfizer Albert Bourla sh
Text messages between European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and the CEO of giant pharmaceutical company Pfizer should be made available to the public, MEPs and NGOs said on Tuesday (18 January).
The demand came after the EU commissioner for transparency and values, Věra Jourová, said that text messages do not fall under the scope of EU transparency rules on access to documents.
"Due to their short-lived and ephemeral nature, text and instant messages are not meant to contain important information relating to policies, activities and decisions of the commission," Jourová said in a written answer to liberal Dutch MEP Sophia in 't Veld.
"They therefore neither qualify as a document subject to the commission record-keeping policy nor are they falling within the scope of regulation on access to documents," she added.
The EU's access to documents law has increasingly become a hot topic in Brussels, mainly because the 2001 rulebook is considered outdated yet previous attempts to update it have gone nowhere.
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