The EU has a voluntary lobby register that covers the European Parliament and European Commission. The register is meant to tell us who the EU's lobbyists are; who they are working for; how much they spend on influencing policy; and what specific dossiers they lobby on. Yet the lobby register does not deliver real transparency, as our recent report “New and Improved? Why the EU Lobby Register still fails to deliver” makes clear.
ALTER EU believes that making lobby information fully transparent can limit unethical lobbying and ensure a better balance between corporate and public interest groups in the access to, and influence they have over, EU decision-making processes.
An announcement by European Commission President Juncker and First Vice-President Timmermans that they will work to boost lobby transparency is a positive development which now gives us a unique political opportunity to demand a high-quality and legally-binding EU register. But in order to achieve this, we need your help.
We would like to invite your organisation to sign-on to the attached letter which we will send to Frans Timmermans, the commissioner responsible, on Monday 11 May.
The deadline for organisational sign-ons is Thursday 7 May. To sign-on, please send a high resolution logo to Claudio Cesarano claudio@access-info.org.
To get involved in the campaign you can also:
- Help us promote the letter on social media when we publish it on 11 May. More information will follow, with specific hashtags etc
- Join our lobby register campaign email list by contacting Nicola at info@alter-eu.org
- Come to our European Parliament event at 9.30am-12.30pm Thursday 23 April to launch our lobby register campaign. Please RSVP to Nicola at info@alter-eu.org
- Participate in our ALTER-EU coalition gathering on Wednesday 22 April at Mundo B in Brussels. Please RSVP to Nicola at info@alter-eu.org
To read a copy of the letter, please visit: http://www.access-info.org/wp-content/uploads/CSO-sign-on-ALTER-EU-11-May-2015.pdf