Dear readers,
We are back with a new issue of the Secrecy Tracker – your regular update on what the EU institutions prefer to keep under wraps.
I am Nikolaj Nielsen, a reporter at EUobserver, who has for years struggled to gain access to EU documents. I wrote this newsletter with the help of EUobserver’s Elena Sánchez Nicolás, Alexander Fanta from Follow the Money, and Pascal Hansens from Investigate Europe.
But this introduction is less a rant about the European Commission’s poor record on accountability and transparency than a warning about a worrying pattern: a powerful institution appears to let political alignments shape whether it releases even the most basic information it holds.
In public, the commission likes to say it is the largest donor of external assistance to the Palestinians, with more than €1bn pledged between 2021 and 2024, and that it supports a two-state solution.
