Call on organisations to take part in Commission's consultation on the Transparency Register.
The European Commission has launched a public consultation on the Transparency Register.
This consultation is open to both organisations that are registered in the Transparency Register and organisations that are involved in the development and implementation of EU policies, but are not registered as such. (See the pdf attached for ALTER-EU's full response to the consultation.)
At the end organisations are asked:
WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE REGISTRANTS OBLIGED TO DISCLOSE MORE INFORMATION THAN THEY DO CURRENTLY?
We would like to call on you as follower and/or supporter of ALTER-EU to answer this question with YES and give the following carefully worded answer (just under 1000 characters):
ALTER-EU has just published an in-depth report entitled 'Dodgy data – time to fix the EU's Transparency Register'. We encourage the European Commission and Parliament to act on the problems highlighted and the recommendations made in this report. We would like to stress the following points:
● the disclosure requirements must be actively enforced, to secure that registrants disclose reliable information regarding lobby budgets, client lists, number of lobbyists employed, and issues lobbied on.
● the voluntary approach should be replaced with mandatory registration in order to ensure that all major lobbying actors are included (also if it concerns the Council).
● the disclosure requirements must be tightened, introducing the obligation to:
list names of all lobbyists (not only those with EP access passes);
disclose lobby expenditure in bandwidths of €10,000 (including for lobby consultancies and law firms reporting on clients);
report on specific funding sources and the amounts received.
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(If you answer 'YES', as we suggest, a sub question pops up, asking you what kind of extra information. Here you could duplicate a part of text below - reworded - so that it stays below 200 characters, like this:
Names of all lobbyists -not only those with EP badges;
Disclose lobby expenditure in bandwidths of €10,000 - including for lobby consultancies/law firms reporting on clients;
Funding sources.)
In case you haven't seen our 'Dodgy Data' report yet, you can find it here: http://www.alter-eu.org/sites/default/files/documents/Dodgy-data.pdf
You can find the consultation questionnaire via the following link: http://ec.europa.eu/yourvoice/ipm/forms/dispatch?form=TransparencyREG&la...
Going through the questionnaire should not take more than 15 minutes (with most of the compulsory questions being straight-forward YES or NO). You would on the other hand really help us in getting our message across!
