The Green/EFA group in the European Parliament is committed to transparency and accountability. I believe that citizens have a right to know what their political representatives are doing and that they should be able to see and control how policy is being made in Brussels.
This is why I, with my colleagues in the Green group, have decided, as a first step, to publish lists of meetings that I or my assistants have with outside lobbyists and interest groups, using an open-source tool which exports meetings from our calendars and publishes them online. Below you will find a list of meetings held with lobby groups. You can also visit for a full list of meetings declared by other MEPs from the Green/EFA group.
These guidelines aim to clarify exactly which meetings I declare.
Which meetings I declare
- I declare meetings with outside lobbyists and interest representatives. The definition of “lobbying” is already set out in the Transparency Register, and it covers “all activities… carried out with the objective of directly or indirectly influencing the formulation or implementation of policy and the decision-making processes of the EU institutions, irrespective of where they are undertaken and of the channel or medium of communication used”.
- I declare meetings held both inside and outside the European Parliament.
- I declare meetings that have been pre-programmed in advance. This includes phone calls. Public events or conferences are not listed here.
- To comply with data protection regulations, while programming a meeting, the lobbyist I am to meet is given a notice that I will declare the meeting as indicated below, including the name of the individual lobbyist. The meeting is conditional on the individual lobbyist’s consent to the publication of his or her name.
- I do not publish meetings held with endangered political dissidents, with whistleblowers or with journalists.
When are meetings declared?
- Meetings are automatically published as soon as possible following the meeting.
How much detail do you declare?
- I publish, at minimum, the date and time of the meeting, the name of the organization, and the name of the lobbyist met with, and the topic of the meeting.
- I also strive to publish links to the lobby groups’ entry in the Transparency Register.
- I declare my own meetings as well as my assistants’.
- I declare meetings held with the Permanent Representations of Member States or with regional representatives, if there is lobbying involved.
- I also declare meetings that I or my colleagues have had with representatives of third countries or other influential public actors such as the IMF, even though these are technically not “lobbyists” under the EU definition.
Ez a bejegyzés az alábbi nyelveken érhető el: Hungarian