The European Commission has received a record number of requests to publish documents, according to statistics released this week.
EU citizens filed applications to see documents 6,912 times in 2018.
The commission called this “a striking increase of approximately 9.5 percent in comparison with 2017”, when the number of requests was 6,255.
Since the entry into force of the EU’s access to documents regulation in 2001, there has been an increase in the number of requests for documents almost every year.
It should be noted that 6,912 applications does not translate into the same number of documents. In fact, those were “far more numerous”, the commission said, without giving an exact figure.
“Whereas applicants may ask for access to a single document, they more frequently request access to a multitude of documents, or even to entire files concerning a specific subject or procedure,” it said.
Last year, the directorate-general (DG) for health and food safety received the highest share of requests (11 percent), followed by the secretariat-general (6.7 percent), and the DG for internal market, industry, entrepreneurship and SMEs (6.5 percent).
