LUXEMBOURG — The European Commission didn’t want to reveal which staffers worked on Covid vaccine contract negotiations with pharma companies to avoid them being targeted by “conspiracy theorists,” its lawyers said Wednesday.
A “lack of trust” about the contracts meant officials could have been subjected to “physical or psychological” harassment, said Antonios Bouchagiar, a Commission lawyer.
“It’s a real risk in this case,” he added in a courtroom in Luxembourg.
The Commission is fighting a 2024 ruling from the EU’s General Court (the bloc’s lower court) that said it should have provided more details about the lucrative contracts — and the people negotiating them — when asked to do so by a group of Green MEPs and members of the public.
The court ruled there was sufficient public interest in disclosing that information, saying: “It was only by having the names, surnames and details of the professional or institutional role of the members of the team in question that they could have ascertained whether or not the members of that team had a conflict of interests.”
The Commission disagreed with that ruling and the case is now at the bloc’s highest court, the Court of Justice of the EU.
The Commission signed six advance purchase agreements with pharma companies at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, promising to buy a certain amount of vaccines for European citizens as part of the EU’s bloc-wide approach to tackling the virus.
The Green lawmakers said the public deserved to know more about how those contracts — worth millions of euros — came to be negotiated. When the MEPs made requests for access to documents, the Commission published redacted information.
More than 3,000 members of the public, many of them skeptics of the EU’s approach and some hostile to mass vaccination policies, brought a separate legal action against the Commission.
Lawyers for both the MEPs and the EU citizens were in court on Wednesday, arguing in front of a packed public gallery that the Commission should uphold the highest standards of transparency.
“It is not some abstract aspiration,” said Raluca Gherghinaru, the lawyer for the MEPs, but a “constitutional value.” She added: “In crisis, we might expect leaders to be more accountable.”
The Commission’s lawyers said the EU executive has already demonstrated a high level of accountability. Unredacted documents which prove that the negotiating team had no conflict of interest were studied by the European Court of Auditors, the lawyers said, adding that the anti-fraud agency (OLAF) and the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) could look into the contracts if they felt that was necessary.
Arnaud Durand, the lawyer for the members of the public who brought the case, argued that EPPO isn’t sufficiently independent because its budget is signed off by the Commission.
The Commission’s lawyers disputed that, saying independence is baked into EPPO and OLAF’s rules.
The Commission also faced tough questioning from the president of the court, Koen Lenaerts, who asked: “Do you really mean that?” when Commission lawyers said that a request for access to information from a member of the public with a “lack of specific interest” should not automatically have to be complied with.
Officials have “the right to work in serenity without having the finger pointed for some policy that they didn’t decide,” Bouchagiar said.
But Lenaerts argued that the negotiations do not only take place at the highest political level but also at a technical level, and therefore any potential conflicts of interest of the civil servants involved deserve to be scrutinized.
To laughter in the court, Lenaerts repeated the Commission’s argument that disclosing the names of staffers could lead to harassment, “particularly by conspiracy theorists.”
Would disclosing those names “not be the best way of combating these conspiracy theorists?” he asked.
The next step in the case will be a legal opinion on June 11 by Advocate-General Athanasios Rantos, which will guide the judges on their final ruling. No date has yet been given for that ruling.
The EU’s Covid vaccine agreements have become a flashpoint for transparency campaigners, with Commission President Ursula von der Leyen coming under fire for her text messages with the CEO of Pfizer, which secured a multibillion-euro agreement with the Commission.
The Commission’s refusal to release von der Leyen’s messages came to be known as “Pfizergate.” The General Court ruled that the Commission was ultimately wrong not to reveal the messages.
