Judging EU secrecy

The overall interaction between the political and the legal systems of the EU has been obscured in recent years. One area where this has happened is that of ‘transparency.’ By selecting a number of recent cases about the interpretation of the access to documents regulations, this article highlights how meta rules on rules can reveal structural fault-lines that are absolutely crucial to understanding how the European Union is developing as a matter of practice. The fault-lines thus revealed all boil down to EU supranational institutions in one form or another struggling to maintain an internal ‘space’, to think, to negotiate, to deliberate, as the case may be, in all serenity and without being disturbed by the broader ‘public’. The cases discussed in this paper also reveal what can be described as a process based and essentially discretionary rationale for secrecy as opposed to a necessity based policy rationale for secrecy. Finally, some wider conclusions are drawn on the relationship between supranational power and legal accountability forums in Luxembourg.